Blooming, Buzzing Confusion

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course examines the social and cognitive mechanisms that drive language learning in the first few years of life. Nearly all children learn the language(s) of their community, despite the fact that human languages and caregiving practices offer immense diversity around the globe. What enables the learning system to adapt so robustly to the environment it finds itself in? We discuss the evidence for and against multiple factors that have been proposed to support language development across the world's communities. We also critically examine how these ideas intersect with current deficit models of language learning. It is expected that, by the end of the course, students will grasp the basic mechanisms proposed to underlie early language learning.