Seminar in Psycholinguistics

Catalog description

Consideration of theoretical and research issues relevant to psychological aspects of language sounds, syntax and semantics, and other cognitive support. LING (PSY) 520 Seminar in Psycholinguistics (3 per semester/maximum of 9) In this seminar, psycholinguistic approaches to bilingualism will be examined. Bilingualism is of interest for a number of reasons. First, despite the prevalence of monolinguals in the United States, most people of the world are bilingual. To have a genuinely universal account of human cognition will therefore require a detailed understanding of the relations between language and thought in individuals who speak and understand more than one language. It will be essential that research on basic cognitive functions in bilinguals examines both the course and the consequence of second language acquisition. Second, bilingualism provides a unique vantage point from which the relations between thought and language may be viewed. Historically, this issue was the focus of the debate over the Whorfian hypothesis (i.e., does language determine thought?). In contemporary psychology, it has emerged as a central issue in the debate over modularity. Understanding the form of language and memory representation in the bilingual may provide an important set of constraints in modeling the fundamental categories of the mind. Finally, bilingualism can provide a research tool for examining cognitive functions that are sometimes impenetrable within an individuals first language. The examination of the mapping of form to meaning in Constructing syntactically well-formed sentences in two languages with contrasting syntax, or in understanding the meaning of words that have similar form but differ in meaning in two languages, provides a tool for developing converging sources of evidence to test theories of language comprehension and memory. Topics to be covered include second language acquisition in children and adults, language comprehension and memory in second language, code switching and language mixing, the consequences of bilingualism, and the neuropsychology of bilingualism.