Course Description

An introduction to psycholinguistic theory and methodology. Topics include phonological perception, lexical access, morphological processing, and syntactic and semantic comprehension. Special focus will be placed on relating these concepts to other domains in cognitive science, including theoretical linguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.

Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Graduate students will be held to higher standards on research skills and review of primary research to demonstrate the application of concepts learned in this class. Specifically, graduate students: a) will present one primary research article in class. b) will write a final term paper including a substantial literature review and a novel experiment proposal on some issue in phonological, morphological, syntactic, or semantic comprehension or production.

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Athena Title

Psycholinguistics

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Prerequisite

LING 2100 or LING 2100E or LING 2100H

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Grading System

A - F (Traditional)

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Student Learning Outcomes

• Students will formulate hypotheses linking behavioral data to linguistic theories.
• Students will distinguish off-line from real-time experimental methodologies
• Students will gain familiarity with principles of experimental design.
• Students will analyze experimental data using basic inferential statistics.
• Students will interpret empirical findings from the primary psycholinguistic literature.
• Students will justify claims about the fine-grained time course of language processing.

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Topical Outline

• 1. Levels of analysis in cognitive science and linguistics
• 2. Categorical and phonotactic perception in phonology
• 3. Lexical access and cohort competition
• 4. Morphological decomposition
• 5. Models of syntactic parsing
• 6. Prediction and top-down processing
• 7. Cue-based retrieval and other theories of memory
• 8. Crosslinguistic variation and multilingualism

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Institutional Competencies

Analytical Thinking

The ability to reason, interpret, analyze, and solve problems from a wide array of authentic contexts.

Communication

The ability to effectively develop, express, and exchange ideas in written, oral, interpersonal, or visual form.

Critical Thinking

The ability to pursue and comprehensively evaluate information before accepting or establishing a conclusion, decision, or action.

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Syllabus

Select Faculty / Instructor to download syllabus:   Foley, Steven MWF 10:20-11:10

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