Syllabus
1. Core concepts, overview of the field, bit of history, overview of methods. Behavioral methods, response time, reading time, psychophysiological methods.
2. Speech perception and language comprehension. Word recognition, phoneme restoration.
3. Language comprehension. Parsing, comprehension of sentential structure. Experimental evidence for sentence structure. Incremental and predictive processing. Gaps and traces.
4. Language production. Speech errors, TOT state. Levelt’s model, interactive models.
5. Sentence production phenomena: agreement attraction, syntactic priming.
6. Word meaning and its representation. Concepts, words and word meanings. Semantic networks, semantic features, spreading activation. Prototype theory. Neuropsychology of meaning. Dual coding, imagebility.
7. Brain and language. Aphasia, neuroimaging and electrophysiological methods. Main findings on language localization.
8. Developmental language disorders, genetic language disorders, language and genetics.
9. Language acquisition. Sensitivity to language before speaking. Segmentation in infants, early comprehension of grammar. CHILDES, telegraphic speech.
10. Bilingualism, multilingualism. Ultimate attainment, bilingual advantage. Shared vs. isolated representation of languages.
11. Reading, activation of phonology in reading. Pseudohomophones, phonological neighborhood. Reading disorders, neuropsychology of reading, developmental disorders.
12. Language and thought. Sapir-Whorf, Vygotsky, language effects on perception and memory.
13. extra topics
Annotation
A survey class on the psychology of language. How language is coded in the mind, how people understand words and sentences, what happens when they use them, and other similar topics