Readings etc.

There is no textbook for the course. Readings for the course will mostly be drawn from recent handbooks or journal articles. One objective of the course is for you to become able to read, understand and critically evaluate the primary literature in experimental linguistics.

Readings will be available in class or 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. 10th). This should cover all of the readings for this class. For the lab which uses the CHILDES database you will also have the possibility of buying a CD copy of the database for a very small fee (covering the cost of the blank CD).

  1. Aitchison, J. 1998. The Articulate Mammal. London: Routledge. (selections)
  2. Crain, S. 1992. Language acquisition in the absence of experience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14, 597&endash;650.
  3. Crain, S. & R. Thornton. 1998. Investigations in Universal Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (selections)
  4. Elman, J. 1993. Learning and neural networks: the importance of starting small. Cognition, 48, 71-99.
  5. Fox, D., S. Crain & Y. Grodzinsky. 1995. An experimental study of children's passive. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics #26, 249-264.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. Gibson, E. 1998. Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1-76.
  9. Gillette, J., H. Gleitman, L. Gleitman & A. Lederer. 1999. Human simulation of vocabulary learning. Cognition.
  10. Gleitman 1990. The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition 1, 1&endash;55.
  11. Hirsh-Pasek, K. & R. Golinkoff. 1996. The Origins of Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (selections)
  12. Jusczyk, P. 1999. How infants begin to extract words from speech. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3, 323-328.
  13. Kim, M., C. Phillips & B. Landau. 1999. Learnability & cross-linguistic variation in locative verbs. in preparation.
  14. MacDonald, M., N. Pearlmutter & M. Seidenberg. 1994. The lexical basis of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review 99, 676&endash;703.
  15. Marcus, G. 1999 (in press). The Algebraic Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (selections)
  16. Marcus, G., S. Vijayan, S. Bandi Rao & P. Vishton. 1999. Rule learning by seven-month old infants. Science, 283, 77-80.
  17. Marslen-Wilson, W. & L.K. Tyler. 1997. Dissociating types of mental computation. Nature 387, 592&endash;594.
  18. 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.
  19. O'Grady, W. 1998. Syntactic Development. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press. (selections)
  20. Phillips, C., E. Yellin, A. Marantz, T. Pellathy, et al. 1999. Auditory cortex accesses phonological categories: A magnetic mismatch study. submitted.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. Plunkett, K. 1995. Connectionist approaches to language acquisition. In P. Fletcher & B. MacWhinney (eds) The Handbook of Child Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 36-72.
  24. Plunkett, K. & J. Elman. 1997. Exercises in Rethinking Innateness: A Handbook for Connectionist Simulations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  25. Poeppel, D. & K. Wexler. 1993. The Full Competence Hypothesis of clause structure in early German. Language, 69, 1-33.
  26. Saffran, J., R. Aslin & E. Newport. 1996. Statistical learning by 8-month old infants. Science 274, 1926.
  27. Sedivy, J. 1999. in press, Cognition.
  28. Seidenberg, M. & J. Hoeffner. 1998. Evaluating behavioral and neuroimaging data on past tense processing. Language 74, 104-122.
  29. Stager, C. & J. Werker. 1997. Infants listen for more phonetic detail in speech perception than word-learning tasks. Nature, 388, 381&endash;382.
  30. Steinhauer, K., K. Alter & A. Friederici. 1999. Brain potentials indicate immediate use of prosodic cues in natural speech processing. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 191-196.
  31. Swaab, T. 1998. Language and the Brain. Chapter 8 of Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind, by Gazzaniga, Ivry & Mangun. New York: Norton.
  32. Tanenhaus, M., M. Spivey-Knowlton, K. Eberhard & J. Sedivy. 1995. Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268, 1632-1634.
  33. 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.
  34. 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.
  35. 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.