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CORE 115S Brains and Tongues: How Do We Acquire Language?
This course explores how infants and adults acquire native and foreign languages. What goes on in the brains of new-born infants before they discover the meanings of words? What might be the linguistic and social consequence of acquiring an English dialectal accent? Why do some adults succeed in learning a second language, while others do not? Why do some humans and other primates have difficulty in acquiring a first language? The course includes lectures, discussion, and hands-on exercises such as acoustic analysis of spoken language. The course will examine physiological, linguistic, psychological, and social factors that determine whether one succeeds or fails to acquire native and foreign languages.
CORE 140S Language and Cognition
What is the relationship between language and cognition? To answer this question this course explores the interrelation between verbal expression and such cognitive faculties as bodily experience, imagination, memory, categorization, and abstract thought. The study of language as a cognitive phenomenon is a relatively new discipline. It originated in the late 70s and early 80s of the XXth century. Since then, cognitive linguistics has been a rapidly-growing field which has been both benefiting from and contributing to its allied disciplines of cognitive psychology, cognitive anthropology and cognitive neuroscience. The course begins by examining the advantages and the shortcomings of the cognitive perspective on the different levels of language (e.g., sounds, words, sentences, texts, etc.). Students explore the connections of cognitive linguistics with the related fields that are broadly referred to as the “cognitive sciences”. No background in linguistics is required, but interest in linguistics is expected.
CORE 150S Linguistics: Data, Theories, and Experiments
Language is by far the most important means of communication among humans and the central cognitive ability separating them from the rest of the animal kingdom. Linguistic activity is all-pervasive and forms the foundation of all other high-level symbolic activities. At the same time, many aspects of this activity remain deeply mysterious. How did the language ability come about? Why is it that children learn their first language with such ease, while most adults have great difficulties learning a second one? How is it possible to learn such a complex set of rules in such a short time, on the basis of a very small corpus of data, much of it grammatically incorrect? These and other questions form the subject matter of the field of linguistics and are explored in this course.