How Humans Learn Language

Catalog description

By the time you read this course description, you have most likely learned more than 40,000 English words. That is at least an average of six words per day—and many more if you are multilingual. How is this possible? Were you born with this ability, or did you learn it? This course will be about how humans come to develop language so early and so quickly among striking environmental variation. For example, caregivers in the United States often alter and repeat their words when talking to children, while caregivers in other communities speak almost exclusively to other adults. And yet, children in both settings successfully learn language on similar timescales. How is this possible? At the same time, no two children are exactly alike. The course will explore how the spectrum of neurodiversity sets many learners on their own developmental and communicative path. We will centrally consider how language learning must be flexible to modalities by learning about babies in deaf communities who rapidly learn to comprehend and produce sign. Crucially, we will always begin by looking at data and 143 Psychology methods: How do you actually measure a neonate’s language abilities? Or an adults? Each week, we will try out some of these experimental methods, such as artificial-language learning, and work with ministudies to collect our own data. The conference project will ask students to propose their own theory of the kind of learning mechanism that can operate under such diverse inputs. The existing proposals will be evaluated to generate critiques and improvements. The course will bring these ideas beyond the seminar room, drawing connections to second-language learning in adults, early- childhood education, and social and economic structures. Conference projects will root novel theoretical proposals of language learning in data and will be developed in conversation with…