Course Syllabus
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION (830:484:01)
Spring 2022
INSTRUCTOR: Prof. Karin Stromswold (kstrom@rutgers.edu)
LECTURES: Mondays & Thursday, 10:20 AM - 11:40 AM in SEC 220
OFFICE HOURS: TBA (on Zoom)
This course explores the cognitive and neural bases of language learning. The underlying question this course seeks to address is: why is learning a language "child's play" for most children? Why can most children learn languages just by hearing them, whereas most adults (and even the world's most powerful computer) struggle to learn new languages even with intensive instruction? To what extent do children learn different aspects of language (sounds, meaning, sentences etc) in similar ways? What are the environmental, cognitive, and neural factors that allow children to master a language, and how can differences in these factors result in atypical language development? Lastly, what can language development tell us about the structure of language and its cognitive and neural bases?
The course will address these questions and other questions through an exploration of the following topics:
Topic 1: Introduction
Topic 2: Phonological development
Topic 3: Lexical development
Topic 4: Morphological development
Topic 5: Syntactic development
Topic 6: Pragmatic development
Topic 7: Acquisition of signed languages
Topic 8: Language learnability theory
Topic 9: Bilingualism & second language acquisition
Topic 10: The neural bases of language acquisition
Topic 11: Atypical language acquisition
For more details, see attached syllabus
Course Summary:
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