BCS 501: Lecture Schedule

Week 1 [Sept 1] Organizational
Week 2 [Sept 8] (Tanenhaus) Introduction: Overview of basic issues: Fundamental issues that arise in the study of language are introduced, especially those that have broad implications for the brain and cognitive sciences. These include (a) natural language as a model system for studying cognition, and (b) the main issues that have framed the field of psycholinguistics.
Week 3 [Sept 22] (Aslin) Speech Perception: Characteristics of speech, how it is perceived, and how speech perception develops.
Week 4 [Sept 29] (Tanenhaus) Spoken Word Recognition: Overview of spoken word recognition, focusing on issues of representation and process. These are the same readings from 2009.
Week 5 [Oct 5] (Jaeger)
Week 7 [Oct 20] (Tanenhaus): Sentence Processing
Overview of history, models and methods in sentence processing: Two-stage serial, parallel constraint-based, memory-based and expectancy models of ambiguity resolution and complexity; on-line methods and linking hypotheses.
Week 8 [October 27] (Jaeger): Language Production: Sentence Production
Week 9: [Nov 7] (Newport): Language acquisition: The nature-nurture issue in language acquisition, evidence for universal stages, and the critical period hypothesis; mechanisms of acquisition
Week 12: [Dec 8] (Newport): Language and the Brain

Readings

Only students who are enrolled in the course may access the course readings online. You must be logged into Blackboard to download these materials.

Week 1: Chomsky, N. (l980). Rules and representations. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(1), 1-15.; Miller, G.A. ( l965). Some preliminaries to psycholinguistics. American Psychologist, 20(1), 15-20.; Miller, G.A. (l990). The place of language in a scientific psychology. In G.A. Miller (Ed.), Psychological Science, 1(1), 7-14.; Seidenberg, M. (1997) Language acquisition and use: Learning and applying probabilistic constraints. Science, 275, 1599-1603.; Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W. T. (2002). The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science, 298, 1569-1579.
Week 2: Balota et al.. (2006). The journey from features to meaning. In Gernsbacher & Traxler. (ed) The handbook of psycholinguistics.; Seidenberg, M.S. (2007). Connectionist models of reading. In Gaskell G.M. (ed) The Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.; Harm, M. & Seidenberg, M.S. (2004). Computing the meanings of words in reading: cooperative division of labor between visual and phonological processes. Psychological Review 111, 3, 662-720.
Week 3: Pisoni, D.B. & Levi, S.V. Representations and representational specificity in speech perception and spoken word recognition. In G. Gaskell (ed), Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics, in press.; Kuhl, P. K. and Miller, J. D. (1975). Speech perception by the Chinchilla: Voiced-voiceless distinction in alveolar plosive consonants. Science, 190, 69-72.; Remez, R. E., Rubin, P. E., Pisoni, D. B., and Carrell, T. D. (1981). Speech perception without traditional speech cues. Science, 212, 947-950.; Kuhl, P. K. (2004). Early language acquisition: Cracking the speech code. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5, 831-843.
Week 4: Marslen-Wilson, W.D. (1987). Functional parallelism. Cognition, 25, 71-102.; McQueen, J.M. (2007). Eight questions about spoken word recognition. In Gaskell G.M. (ed) The Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.; Gaskell, G.M. (2007). Statistical and connectionist models of speech perception and spoken word recognition. In Gaskell G.M. (ed) The Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.; Magnuson, J. S., Dixon, J. A., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Aslin, R. N. (2007). The dynamics of lexical competition during spoken word recognition. Cognitive Science, 31, 133-156.
Week 5: Kraljic, Brennan, and Samuel 2008 AND; Babel 2010 OR Farmer, Fine, and Jaeger 2011/Kleinschmidt and Jaeger 2011
Week 7: Frazier, L. (1988). Sentence processing: A tutorial review. In M. Coltheart (Ed.), Attention and Performance. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.; Gibson, E. (2002). Linguistic complexity in sentence processing. In Oxford Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science; Marslen-Wilson, W. (1975). Sentence perception as an interactive parallel process. Science, 189, 226-228.; Levy R. (2008) Expectation-based sentence processing. Cognition; Tanenhaus, M.K. & Trueswell, J.C. (1995). Sentence comprehension. In: J.L. Miller & P.D. Eimas (Eds.). Handbook of perception and cognition Vol. 11: Speech, language and communication, 217-262. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Week 8: Griffin, Z. M. (2003). A reversed word length effect in coordinating the preparation and articulation of words in speaking. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 10(3), 603-609.; Ferrreira, V. (1996). Is it better to give than to donate? Syntactic flexibility in language production. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 724-755.; Dell, Oppenheim, & Kittredge (2008). Saying the right word at the right time: Syntagmatic and paradigmatic interference in sentence production. Lang Cogn Process, 23(4): 583–608.
Week 9: Lenneberg, E.H. (1969). On explaining language: The development of language in children can best be understood in the context of developmental biology. Science, 164, 635-643.; Gleitman, L.R., & Newport, E.L. (1995). The invention of language by children: Environmental and biological influences on the acquisition of language. In L.R. Gleitman and M. Liberman (Eds.), An Invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd ed. Vol 1: Language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.; Newport, E.L. (2002). Critical periods in language development. In L. Nadel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd./Nature Publishing Group.; Newport, E.L., & Aslin, R.N. (2000). Innately constrained learning: Blending old and new approaches to language acquisition. In S. C. Howell, S. A. Fish, and T. Keith-Lucas (eds.), Proceedings of the 24th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.; Marcus, G., Vijayan, S., Bandi Rao, S., & Vishton, P. M. (1999). Rule-learning in seven-month-old infants, Science, 283, 77-80.; Aslin, R.N. & Newport, E.L. (2011). Statistical learning: From acquiring specific items to forming general rules. Current Directions in Psychological Science, in press.; [Optional: Pinker, S. & Prince, A. (1988). On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition, 28, 73-193.]
Week 12: Lennenberg, E.H. (1967). Biological Foundations of Language. New York: Wiley. pp 143-154.; Dronkers, N. & Pinker, S. (1999). Language and the aphasias. In Kandel, E., Schwartz, J., & Jeffries, T. (Eds.), Principles of Neural Sciences. 4th Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.; Caplan, D. (2006). Why is Broca's area involved in syntax? Cortex, 42, 469-471.; Friederici, A. (2006). Broca's area and the ventral premotor cortex in language: functional differentiation and specificity. Cortex, 42, 472-475.; Optional:
Hickok, G., Bellugi, U. & Klima, E. (1996). The neurobiology of sign language and its implications for the neural basis of language. Nature, 381, 699-702.
Perani, D., & Abutalebi, J. (2005). The neural basis of first and second language processing. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 15, 202–206.

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