Readings etc.

Readings for the course will mostly be articles taken from recent journals or handbooks. There will usually be one article assigned for each class.

Can be obtained from the Linguistics Department (46 E. Delaware Ave.). You will need to pay in advance for the readings: please go to the Linguistics Department office and pay Jane Creswell $20 by the end of the second week of classes (Sept. 11th). This should cover all of the readings for this class. Jane Creswell also has copies of the CHILDES database on CD for people who want to use it at home or in a campus computer lab.

Jean Aitchison's book The Articulate Mammal: an introduction to psycholinguistics has been ordered for this course, and should be available in the campus bookstore. This book introduces many of the topics that we will discuss in the course in a highly readable fashion. We will use the book as background/introductory material rather than as a textbook per se. Most of the work in the course will be based on (i) hands-on lab projects, (ii) readings of primary literature, (iii) class discussions.

  1. Crain, S. 1992. Language acquisition in the absence of experience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14, 597&endash;650.
  2. Dell, G. Speaking and misspeaking. In L. Gleitman & M. Liberman (eds) Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol 1 (2nd edn.), 183-208.
  3. Ferreira, V. 1997. Is it better to give than to donate? Syntactic flexibility in language production. Journal of Memory and Language 35, 724-755.
  4. Friederici, A. 1995. The time course of syntactic activation during language processing: a model based on neuropsychological and neurophysiological data. Brain and Language 50, 259-281.
  5. Garrett, M. 1990. Sentence processing. In D. Osherson & H. Lasnik (eds.), Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol. 1 (1st edn.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 133-175.
  6. Gibson, E. 1998. Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition (in press).
  7. Gleitman 1990. The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition 1, 1&endash;55.
  8. Jaeger, J., A. Lockwood, D. Kemmerer, R. van Valin, B. Murphy & H. Khalak. 1996. A Positron Emission Tomographic Study of Regular and Irregular verb Morphology in English. Language 72, 451&endash;497.
  9. MacDonald, M., M. Just & P. Carpenter. 1992. Working memory constraints on the processing of syntactic ambiguity. Cognitive Psychology 24, 56-98.
  10. MacDonald, M., N. Pearlmutter & M. Seidenberg. 1994. The lexical basis of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review 99, 676&endash;703.
  11. Marslen-Wilson, W. & L.K. Tyler. 1997. Dissociating types of mental computation. Nature 387, 592&endash;594.
  12. Matthews, J. & C. Brown. 1998. Qualitative and quantitative differences in the discrimination of second language speech sounds. In Proceedings of BUCLD 22. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  13. Petersen, S., P. Fox, M. Posner, M. Mintun & M. Raichle. 1988. Positron emission tomographic studies of the cortical anatomy of single-word processing. Nature 331, 585-589.
  14. Pinker, S. 1994. How could a child learn verb syntax to learn verb semantics? In: L. Gleitman & B. Landau (eds.), The Acquisition of the Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 377&endash;410.
  15. Pinker, S. 1995. Why the child holded the baby rabbits: a case study in language acquisition. In L. Gleitman & M. Liberman (eds) Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol 1 (2nd edn.), 107-133.
  16. Plunkett, K. 1995. Connectionist approaches to language acquisition. In P. Fletcher & B. MacWhinney (eds) The Handbook of Child Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 36-72.
  17. Plunkett, K. & J. Elman. 1997. Exercises in Rethinking Innateness: A Handbook for Connectionist Simulations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  18. Saffran, J., R. Aslin & E. Newport. 1996. Statistical learning by 8-month old infants. Science 274, 1926.
  19. Seidenberg, M. & J. Hoeffner. 1998. Evaluating behavioral and neuroimaging data on past tense processing. Language 74, 104-122.
  20. Stager, C. & J. Werker. 1997. Infants listen for more phonetic detail in speech perception than word-learning tasks. Nature, 388, 381&endash;382.
  21. Ullman, M., S. Corkin, M. Coppola, G. Hickok, J. Growdon, W. Koroshetz & S. Pinker. 1997. A neural dissociation within language: evidence that the mental dictionary is part of declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural system. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 266&endash;276.
  22. Werker, J. 1995. Exploring developmental changes in cross-language speech perception. In L. Gleitman & M. Liberman (eds) Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol 1 (2nd edn.), 87-106.
  23. Zurif, E. 1990. Language and the brain. In D. Osherson & H. Lasnik (eds.), Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol. 1 (1st edn.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 177-198.