LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
(16:830:550:01/16:185:601)
Last Changed: 10/10/2007
Instructor: Karin
Stromswold
(karin@ruccs.rutgers.edu); phone (732) 445-2448
Time: Fall
2007, Wednesday 9:30 am -12:00 pm
Location: Psychology
Building (Busch Campus) Room 301
Office
Hours: Psychology Bldg, Room 233,
Time: Thursdays 12-1 pm
This
year, the course will concentrate on typically and atypically developing
childrenÕs acquisition of syntax and sentence processing. The goals of
the course are to explore/investigate five interrelated topics 1) how do
children acquire complex syntactic structures, 2) on cognitive and neural
levels, how do children process complex syntactic structures, 3) how do
limitations in childrenÕs language processing (i.e., performance limitations)
affect our models of children's linguistic abilities (i.e., linguistic
competence 4) how do children's linguistic abilities affect the way they
process language, 5) on cognitive and neural levels, how do children process
sentences differently than adults, on both a cognitive
The
course is appropriate for psychology graduate students (especially those with
cognitive, clinical, behavioral neuroscience or developmental interests) and
graduate students with backgrounds in any of the subfields of cognitive science
(psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, neuroscience).
Requirements
for everyone (including auditors):
¥ Attend class regularly
and participate in class discussions
¥ Do each week's
assigned readings (approx. 50-100 pp/wk)
¥ To help focus and
foster class discussion, prior to
each class, students will be
expected to email one question/comment about each of the week's assigned readings to the participants
in the class. For email addresses for all students in the class send email to
me Karin@ruccs.rutgers.edu
To
receive a grade for this course, you also must write a term paper (15-20
pages).
The
format of the term paper 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 language
acquisition).
Topics
that will be covered will depend on the interests and backgrounds of the
students (to be determined at the first meeting of the class). HereÕs a tentative schedule:
|
Week |
TOPIC |
|
Week 1 |
Introduction to language & language
acquisition |
|
Week 2 |
Language Acquisition & learnability |
|
Week 3 |
Developmental language disorders |
|
Week 4 |
Neuroimaging techniques |
|
Week 5 |
Passive sentences: Structure & normal acquisition |
|
Week 6 |
Passive sentences: On-line and imaging studies |
|
Week 7 |
Passive sentences: Atypical populations |
|
Week 8 |
Relative clauses: Structure & normal acquisition |
|
Week 9 |
Relative clauses: On-line & imaging studies
|
|
Week 10 |
Relative clauses: Atypical populations |
|
Week11 |
Pronouns: Structure & normal acquisition |
|
Week 12 |
Pronouns: On-line & imaging studies |
|
Week 13 |
Pronouns: Atypical populations |
|
Week 14 |
Wrap-up |
Required text: OÕGrady, W. 1997.
Syntactic Development.
Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Background reading for students with little or
no background in language acquisition:
Hoff, E.. 2005. Language Development, 3rd edition. Belmont, CA, Thompson
& Wadsworth.
Pinker, S. 1994. The Language Instinct. William Morrow. (Any edition).
Week
1: What does one have to do to
acquire a language.
Pinker, S. 1995. Language acquisition.
In L. R. Gleitman & M. Liberman (Eds.), An Invitation to
Cognitive Science, 2nd edition:
Language .MIT
Press.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/INTRO/pinker-part1.pdf
O'Grady,
W. 1997. Syntactic development, chapter 1 (pp
1-9).
Week 2: Language learnability
Pinker, S. 1995. Language acquisition.
In L. R. Gleitman & M. Liberman (Eds.), An Invitation to
Cognitive Science, 2nd edition:
Language. MIT Press. http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/INTRO/pinker-part2.pdf
O'Grady,
W. 1997. Syntactic development, chapter 12 (pp
245-64).
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/LEARNABILITY/OGrady_chapter_12.pdf
Bertolo,
S. (2001). A brief overview of
learnability. In S. Bertolo (ed), Language
acquisition and learnability.
Cambridge University Press, pp 1-14.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/LEARNABILITY/bertolo.pdf
Optional: Pinker, S. (1979). Formal models of
language learning. Cognition, 7, 217-283.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/LEARNABILITY/pinkerformal1.pdf
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/LEARNABILITY/pinkerformal2.pdf
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/LEARNABILITY/pinkerformal3.pdf
Optional: Stromswold, K. What a mute child tells us about
language. Unpublished mss.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/LEARNABILITY/StromMute.htm
Week
3: Atypical language development
All
students will read the following review article:
Stromswold,
K. (2000). The cognitive neuroscience of language acquisition. In M. Gazzaniga
(ed), The cognitive neurosciences, second edition Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, pp 909-932.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/CogNeuroStrom.pdf
In
addition, each student will also locate and read a paper (or chapter) on
atypical language development.
Ideally, this paper will be a short review paper that provides
information about the linguistic, nonlinguistic and neural development. Some possibilities of atypical
acquisition include Williams syndrome, specific language impairment, autism,
language learning without normal input (Nicaraguan Sign Language, Genie), hemispherectomized
children.
Here
are the articles students chose:
Fombonne,
E (1999). The epidemiology of autism: A review. Psychological Medicine, 29, 769-786.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/Fombonne_autism.pdf
Mervis,
C. B. & Becerra, A. M.
(2007). Language and
communicative development in Williams syndrome. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities
Research Reviews 13,
3-15.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/Mervis_Williams.pdf
Grimshaw,
G. M, Adelstein, A., Bryden, M. P an d MacKinnon, G.E. (1998). First-language acquisition in adolescence: Evidence for a critical period for
verbal language development. Brain
and Language, 63,
237-255.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/Grimshaw_DeafIsolate.pdf
Pulsifer,
M. B., Brandt, J., Salorio, C. F., Vining, E. P. G., Carson, B. S., &
Freeman, J. M. (2004). The cognitive outcome of
hemispherectomy in 71 children. Epilepsia
45(3), 243-254
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/Pulsifer_hemispherectomy.pdf
Stromswold, K. (1999). Specific language impairments. T. Feinberg and M. Farah, eds., Patient-based approaches
to cognitive neuroscience. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/Strom_SLI.pdf
Week
4: Neuroimaging techniques.
Buckner,
R.L. & Logan, J. M. R. (2001) Functional neuroimaging methods : PET and
fMRI. In Cabeza & A. Kingstone
(ed.), Handbook of functional neuroimaging of cognition, pp. 28-47. Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/Buckner_PET_fMRI.pdf
Rivkin,
M. J. (2000): Developmental
neuroimaging of children using magnetic resonance techniques. Mental
Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews, 6(1), 68-80.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/Rivkin_neurodeve_MRI.pdf
Giedd, J. N, Shaw, P., Wallace, G., Gogtay, N., Lenroot, R. K. (2006) Anatomic brain
imaging studies of normal and abnormal brain development in children and
adolescents. D. Cicchetti, &
D. J. Cohen, Eds., Developmental psychopathology, Vol 2: Developmental
neuroscience (2nd ed.). (pp. 128-139). Hoboken, NJ,: John Wiley &
Sons Inc.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/Giedd_StructImage.pdf
OPTIONAL:
Barkovich,
A. J. (2005). Pediatric neuroimaging, 4th
edition. pp 1-16.
Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams
& Wilkins.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/Barkovich_PedImag.pdf
Week
5: Passives
OÕGrady,
William (1997). Passives. In W. OÕGrady, Syntactic Development, pp. 192-204. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/Passive_OÕGrady.pdf
Week
6: On-line and Neuroimaging
Studies of Passives
Stromswold,
K. (2006). Why Children Understand and
Misunderstand Sentences: An Eye-tracking Study of Passive Sentences. Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science
Technical Report
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/PsvEye_Children.pdf
Hahne,
A.; Eckstein, K. & Friederici, A.
(2004). Brain signatures of
syntactic and semantic processes during children's language development. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience,16(7) 1302-1318.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/Hahne_passiveERP.pdf
Week
7: Passive sentences: Atypical populations
van der Lely, H. K. J. (1996). Specifically
language impaired and normally developing children: Verbal passive vs
adjectival passive sentence interpretation. Lingua, 98, 243-272.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/Lely_SLIpassive.pdf
Leonard, L. B., Wong, A. M.-Y,
Deevy, P., Stokes, S. F.,
Fletcher, P. (2006). The
production of passives by children with specific language impairment: Acquiring
English or Cantonese.
Applied Psycholinguistics, 27(2),
267-299.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/Leonard_SLIpassive.pdf
Ring,
M. & Clahsen. (2005) Distinct patterns of language impairment in Down's
syndrome and Williams syndrome: The case of syntactic chains. Journal of Neurolinguistics,
18(6) 479-501.
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/550.READINGS/Ring_DS_WSpassive.pdf