GRADUATE SEMINAR IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS (16:830:602:01)

 

Last Changed: 9//15/08

 

Announcement: A course website has been established on Sakai. 

 

 

Instructor:              Karin Stromswold

Email:                       karin@ruccs.rutgers.edu

Phone:                   (732) 445-2448

Course URL         http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/602syllabus.htm

Office Hours:       TBA

 

Course Overview.  This course covers the core areas in psycholinguistics. There are no prerequisites and the course is appropriate for interested graduate students in psychology, linguistics, or cognitive science.  The course has a lecture component and a seminar component.  The lecture component will provide an overview/review  in psycholinguistics needed to participate in the seminar component.    In the seminar component, we will read and discuss classic and recent articles in psycholinguistics that complement the lecture portion of the course.

 

Lecture component:  Monday & Thursday, 10:20-11:40 AM, Pharmacy Building, Room 115  

Syllabus for the lecture component:  http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/351syllabus.htm

 

Seminar component:  Mondays 12:00-1:30 PM, Psychology Building, Room 301

 

Grad students will be assessed based on 

1) Performance on two essay hour exams (pass/fail)

2) Participation in the seminar/discussion session

3) One of the following

                  a.  One long-ish paper  (15- 20 pages)

                  b.  Two medium length papers (8-10 pages)

                  c.  Short (1-2 pp) commentaries on each week's graduate readings.

 

The format of the long and medium-length papers is very flexible.  For example, you might choose to do a library research paper, to propose and design a series of experiments to test a particular issue, to conduct a pilot experiment, to analyze data which were collected by someone other than you (the www is a good source to look for data sets), to do a computer simulation, etc.  If you get approval from me ahead of time, you may work in teams, but I will expect team projects to be more ambitious than individual projects.  Potential topics for the project are also quite broad.  You may choose to cover in more depth something that was covered in class, or you may choose a topic that was not covered in class (as long as it has to do with psycholinguistics). 

 

Tentative Schedule

 

Week

TOPIC

Week 1

Human Language vs. Animal Communication Systems

Week 2

Language and Thought (1)

Week 3

Language and Thought (2)

Week 4

Speech Production

Week 5

Speech Perception

Week 6

Lexical Access

Week 7

Sentence Processing

Week 8

Typical Language Acquisition

Week 9

Atypical Language Acquisition

Week 10

Neuroimaging of Language

Week11

Genetics of Language

Week 12

Evolution of Language

 

 

 

 

Reading List

 

Week 1:  Animal communication vs. human language

 

Hauser, M., Chomsky, N., & W.T. Fitch (2002).  The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has, It, and How Did It Evolve?Science, 298(5598):1569-79.

 

Bever, T  & M.  Montalbetti (2002).  Linguistics:  Noam's Ark.  Science, 298(5598):1565-6.

 

Week 2:  Language and thought (I)

 

Rosch, Eleanor H. (1973) Natural Categories.  Cognitive Psychology 4, 328-350.

 

Jules Davidoff, Ian Davies, and Debi Roberson (1999). Colour categories in a stone-age tribe.  Nature 398, 203-204.

 

Week 3:  Language and thought (2)

 

Boroditsky, L. (2001). Does language shape thought?: Mandarin and English speakersŐ conceptions of time. Cognitive Psychology, 43, 1–22

 

January, D. & Kako, E. (2007) Re-evaluating evidence for linguistic relativity: Reply to Boroditsky (2001).  Cognition 104, 417-426.

 

Chen, J-Y.  (2007).  Do Chinese and English speakers think about time differently?  Failure of

replicating Boroditsky (2001).  Cognition 104, 417-426.