Overview

Psycholinguistics stands at the crossroads of linguistics, psychology, computer science and neuroscience. The basic objective of psycholinguistics is to understand how the human mind/brain supports the learning, comprehension and production of language.

This course provides a hands-on introduction to the state-of-the-art in psycholinguistics, covering the following general questions:

• Knowledge: What is the current state of our understanding of language learning and processing?
  This will be studied through readings, lectures and in-class discussions, and written homework assignments.
• Techniques: What experimental and analytic techniques have been used to learn these things?
  This will be studied over the course of a series of Lab Assignments and a Group Project, which together will provide hands-on experience in designing and running experiments, analyzing data, searching databases and manipulating computer models.
• Frontiers: What areas of psycholinguistics are still poorly understood, and where can we hope to make significant progress in coming years?

By virtue of the different disciplines and techniques that psycholinguistics brings together, it is a field in which collaborative work is very important. Accordingly, a good deal of the work in this course will involve working in a team with your classmates.

Schedule

Times & Places

• Lectures: Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00-12:15, Gore 308

Topics

Note: this schedule is tentative, and is likely to change. Updates will be marked on this page.

Dates marked in yellow are due dates for assignments, labs, projects. (Rare) vacations are marked in pink.

September
Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
	31 Class 1: Introduction Read: Aitchison, Ch. 1, 4-5	1	2 Class 2: Speech Perception - Initial and Final states Read: Werker 1995	3
6 Labor Day	7 Class 3: Speech Perception - Development, Features Read: Matthews & Brown 1998, Phillips et al. 1999	8	9 Class 4: Early Word Learning Lab 1 due Read: Jusczyk 1999, Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff 1996, Stager & Werker 1997, Saffran et al. 1996	10
13	14 Class 5: Verb Learning Read: Gleitman 1990, Pinker 1994	15	16 Class 6: Verb Learning Homework 1 due Read: Gilette et al. 1999	17
20	21 Class 7: Verb Learning - Cross-language variation Read: Kim et al. 1999, Aitchison Ch. 8	22	23 Class 8: Morphosyntax - Cross-language variation Read: Poeppel & Wexler 1993	24
27	28 Class 9: Morphosyntax - Development Lab 2 due	29	30 Class 10: Syntactic Constraints, Experimental Methods Read: Crain 1992, Crain & Thornton 1998

October
Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
				1
4	5 Class 11: Delayed Syntactic Knowledge Group Project topic due Read: Fox et al. 1995, O'Grady 1998	6	7 Class 12: Rules & Networks - Past Tense I Lab 3 due Read: Pinker 1995, Plunkett 1995	8 Fall Break!
11	12 Class 13: Rules & Networks - Past Tense II Read: Ullman et al. 1997, Marslen-Wilson et al. 1997, Seidenberg & Hoeffner 1998	13	14 Class 14: Neural Network Models Lab 4a due Read: Marcus 1999, Marcus et al. 1999	15
18	19 Class 15: Learning Mechanisms I Lab 4b due Read: Elman 1993, Rohde & Plaut 1999	20	21 Class 16: Learning Mechanisms II	22
25	26 Class 17: Group Project Report I	27	28 Class 18: Comprehension - Background Read: Aitchison Ch. 9, Garrett 1990, (optional, Phillips 1996, Ch. 5)	29

November
Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
1	2 Class 19: Comprehension - Syntactic Search & Errors Lab 5 due	3	4 Class 20: Comprehension - breakdown and recovery Read: MacDonald et al. 1994, Gibson 1998	5
8	9 Class 21: Comprehension - Lexical integration Lab 6a due	10	11 Class 22: Comprehension - Semantic analysis Read: Tanenhaus et al. 1995, Sedivy 1999	12
15	16 Class 23: Neurolinguistics - Aphasiology Lab 6b due Read: Swaab 1998, Zurif 1990	17	18 Class 24: Neurolinguistics - Electrophysiology	19
22	23 Class 25: Neurolinguistics - Electrophysiology Read: Friederici 1995, Steinhauer et al. 1999	24	25 Thanksgiving	26 Thanksgiving
29	30 Class 26: Neurolinguistics - Functional Neuroimaging

December
Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
		1	2 Class 27: Group Project Report II	3
6	7 Class 28: Group Project Report II	8	9	10
13	14 Group Project Final Reports Due	15	16	17
20	21	22	23	24
27	28	29	30	31

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, 597-650.
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, 1-55.
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, 676-703.
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, 592-594.
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, 377-410.
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, 381-382.
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, 266-276.
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.

Requirements

There will be no exams for this course. The focus of the course is on reading, discussing, writing and doing throughout the semester, and hence your entire grade will be based upon this.

If you want to get the maximum benefit from this class (i.e. learn lots and have a grade to show for it at the end), you will do the following...

1. Come to class prepared, and participate (15% of grade).

Being prepared means having read the assigned article(s) before coming to class, and having jotted down your initial thoughts or questions about the article(s). Although there are many readings for this course, you are not expected to read them all from beginning to end. An important skill to develop is the ability to efficiently extract ideas and information from writing. Particpating in class discussions is valuable because it makes you an active learner and massively increases the likelihood that you will understand and retain the material. You should also feel free to contact the instructor outside of class with questions that you have about the material.

2. Think carefully and write clearly in assignments (60% of grade).

The assignments will come in a variety of formats. In lab assignments (approx. 6) you will get hands-on experience with various research techniques in psycholinguistics. In writing assignments (approx. 3) you will think and write about issues raised in class and in the assigned readings. Sometimes the writing assignment will be due before the material is discussed in class: this will help you to be better prepared for class and to form your own opinions in advance of class discussion. In your writing it is important to write clearly and provide support for claims that you make.

3. Work with your group on your group project (25% of grade).

The goal of the group project is to give you the opportunity to explore some area of psycholinguistics in more depth than is possible in class, and to give you experience in posing and answering your own research questions. As such this is much like a standard term-paper requirement. However, by working in a team, you benefit from the different skills that your group members contribute, and you should be able to avoid the very limited scope normally possible for an individual project and the solitary final-week panic that usually accompanies such projects. Your group should decide on a project and give a brief report to the class on Thursday September 30th. An initial in class presentation (approx. 20 mins) will be given on Thursday October 21st, and a final in-class presentation on Thursday December 2nd or Tuesday December 7th.

If you are worried about how you are doing in the course, do not hesitate to contact the instructor, either by email (colin@udel.edu) or by phone (831-6809) or by coming by my office in person.

Grade scale

A	80-100%	B-	60-65%
A-	75-80%	C+	55-60%
B+	70-75%	C	50-55%
B	65-70%	C-	45-50%

Note that even in the A range there is plenty of room for you to show extra initiative and insight.

Graduates, Undergraduates, Groups

For undergraduate students, this is an advanced undergraduate course, designed primarily for students pursuing degrees in a field related to Linguistics or Cognitive Science. For graduate students, this is the foundational course in experimental linguistics for the MA and PhD program in Linguistics. Although the basic course requirements are the same for graduates and undergraduates, a higher standard is expected of students registered for CGSC 696 than for students registered for CGSC 496. Clarity and explicitness in writing is expected of both undergraduate and graduate students, but a higher level of linguistic sophistication is expected of graduate students.

All students are encouraged to talk with the instructor out of class about questions or concerns that they may have. Undergraduate students are especially encouraged to come for additional help.

Written work should be submitted individually, but you are encouraged to work together on labs and homeworks as well as the group projects. Academic honesty includes giving appropriate credit to collaborators. Although collaboration is encouraged, collaboration should not be confused with writing up the results of a classmate's work - this is unacceptable. The group projects will be given a group grade, but your group should submit an explanation of who contributed to what.

Group Projects

 A wide range of projects can be undertaken for the group project. In the past group projects have included literature reviews and original research projects, including an experimental project on regular/irregular morphology in children and adults, a self-paced reading experiment on processing dative and double-object constructions, and projects on the perception of Arabic and Korean speech sounds by non-native speakers. You can choose a topic of your own invention, or you can choose from a list of possible topics that will be made available. All projects should be discussed with and approved by the instructor.

Groups for the group projects will be assigned after the first couple of weeks of the semester. In general, the groups will consist of a mix of graduate and undergraduate students. A brief in-class report (5 minutes) of the chosen topic will be given in early October, with a longer preliminary report (15 minutes) in late October. A second in-class presentation (20 minutes) will be given in early December, and the final project write-up will be due on the Tuesday of finals week.