Psycholinguistics

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This is an interdisciplinary course on the psychology of language (psycholinguistics) designed to introduce students to the important issues, ideas, and scientific research in this field. We will cover the cognitive processes of speech perception, word recognition, sentence processing, language production, and language acquisition, across language modalities (signed and spoken) and in a range of populations (e.g. healthy adults and children; multilinguals; and individuals with brain damage). We will explore a range of perspectives on these issues by reading and discussing research papers from psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive science, and computer science. To allow students to engage with all of these perspectives, the course will provide background on relevant research methods (e.g. eyetracking, brain imaging, artificial language learning) as well as practical training on how to read and understand scientific papers in an unfamiliar field. Prerequisites: Prior coursework in linguistics, psychology, or cognitive science; or permission of instructor.