Language acquisition 

Acquisition of sound structure. During the first year of life infants become increasingly sensitive to language-specific features of the sound system of their native language. In this part of the course we review segmental, phonotactic, and prosodic aspects of phonological acquisition, and examine the research paradigms used to investigate infant and child speech perception. The results from perception studies are compared to those from production studies. Production studies show that there is a continuum between babbling and early words in terms of motor skills, but cognitive factors come into play too as children build their phonological systems.

The acquisition of information structure, syntax and the syntax-semantic interface: The second part focuses on first language acquisition and the development of grammatical processing mechanisms. We will examine research on first language acquisition and children's sentence processing, and ask what the relationship is between the development of grammatical competence and the development of processing mechanisms/strategies; how L1 parsing procedures develop; and how children process sentences in comparison to adults.

Studies investigating children's real-time language processing have until recently been rare in comparison to studies of children's production and ultimate interpretation of language. This is surprising given the arguably crucial role that processing mechanisms may play in language development. In this course, the aim is to provide an overview on the topic of developmental psycholinguistics.

Mastering a first language is one of the most striking achievements of human development. This course provides an introduction to theory, empirical findings, and research methods in the study of language acquisition. This course comprises two parts. After a general introduction into the field, we will focus on the acquisition of sound structure and the acquisition of information structure, syntax, and the syntax-semantics interface. In both parts there will be substantial attention to children's online processing.

Assignments and research proposals

Literature

• Lecture notes
• Literature will be provided on Blackboard

Representative readings

• Fikkert, P. (2007). Acquiring phonology In: Paul de Lacy (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology, Cambridge University Press. 537-554.
• Fodor, J. D. (1998). Parsing to Learn. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 27(3), 339-374.
• Gerken, LouAnn (2002). 'Early sensitivity to linguistics form'. Annual Review of Language Acquisition 2: 1-36.
• Guasti, M.-T. (2002). Language acquisition: The growth of language. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Tager-Flusberg, H. (1996). Putting words together: Morphology and syntax in the preschool years. In J. Berko Gleason (ed.). The development of language. (4th edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon