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In this course we shall cover three main research areas in psycholinguistics: first language acquisition, speech production, and language comprehension. We shall be concerned with questions like: How do children acquire language in a relatively short time and with seemingly little effort? How do they acquire two languages simultaneously if they live in a bilingual environment? How do speakers transform complex thoughts into temporally linear sound waves? And how do listeners decode these sound waves - on the word, sentence and discourse levels? What is going on in their brains when they do so? Next to such questions about content we shall also be concerned with questions of methodology: how do we find out about these processes? What empirical methods do researchers apply to find out about the intricate relations between competence and performance? We shall hear about questionnaires for acceptability ratings, response time methods like lexical decision tasks, self-paced readings, the monitoring of eye-movements, as well as brain research methods.
Literature: Fernández, Eva M. & Helen Smith Cairns (2011): Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics. Wiley-Blackwell. We shall also read some research papers that will be made available on Moodle.
Credits: Course credits will be given for homework, short voluntary oral presentations, and discussion in class. |
