Language and the Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics

About

This module is an introduction to Psycholinguistics, an interdisciplinary field of study which aims to understand how humans learn, represent, comprehend and produce language.

It will begin by asking what it means to know a language and explore the nature of our linguistic competence.

You will examine core properties of mental representations and processes involved in acquiring and understanding language and how linguistic processes unfold in real-time.

Finally, you will explore issues in perception, production and acquisition in three core domains: speech sounds, words and sentences.

The experimental studies discussed in the lectures and seminars include those which employed eye-tracking and EEG in reading, comprehension and lexical decision tasks, as well as semantic and syntactic priming in comprehension and production tasks.

Week one
Linguistic competence: knowledge of language, mental grammar, applying scientific method to study language
Biological basis of language: Universal Grammar, Plato’s problem, poverty of the stimulus
Acquisition of language: Universal Grammar continued, poverty of the stimulus continued, word segmentation and statistical learning in infants
Experimental design and methods: basics of experimental design

Week two
Speech perception: categorical perception, phonetics vs phonology, development of the sound system
Lexical access: spoken word recognition, processing words in context, lexical frequency and ambiguity
Introduction to syntax: argument structure and thematic roles, constituency testing, filler-gap dependencies, c-command, binding principles and syntactic ambiguity
Processing sentences: global vs local syntactic ambiguity, garden path effect, building sentences in real-time
Processing sentences: long distance dependencies in language, active gap filling

Week three
Language and memory: temporal dimension in language processing, referential dependencies
Language and prediction: evidence for predictive language processing, when predictions are wrong
Introduction to computational linguistics: what LLMs can and cannot do to help us study human language and its acquisition
Syntactic priming and the role of animacy in word order

Course leader

Dr. Alina Konrad

Course aim

This module aims to:

- Illustrate core issues in Cognitive Science through a discussion of the mental representations and processes involved in acquiring and understanding language.
- Appreciate how knowledge is created in Cognitive Science.
- Introduce you to the basics of experimental design and core experimental techniques.
- Provide a foundation for further study in Linguistics, Cognitive Psychology and other areas of Cognitive Science and Cognitive Neuroscience.

Fee info