LGCS/PSYCH 123: Acquisition of Language

Additional Readings

Week 3: Biological Bases of language (Hoff Chapter 2)

Terrace, H. S. et al. 1979. Can an Ape Create a Sentence? Science, vol. 206, no. 4421, 891-902.

Week 4: Phonological Development (Hoff Chapter 3)

Jusczyk, P. W. 2002. How infants Adapt Speech-Processing Capacities to Native-Language Structure. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11, 1, 15-18.

Optional/Additional Reading:

Holowka, S. and Petitto, L. A. 2002. Left Hemisphere Cerebral Specialization for Babies while Babbling. Science, Vol. 297, p. 1515.

Week 5-6: Lexical Development (Hoff Chapter 4)

Hollich, G., Hirsh-Pasek, K. and Golinkoff, R. M. 2000. What does it take to learn a word? In Breaking the Language Barrier: An Emergentist Coalition Model for the Origins of Word Learning. In the Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development series, No. 262, Vol. 65, No. 3, Blackwell Publishers, 1-16.

Weeks 7-8: Syntax and Morphological Development (Hoff Chapter 5)

Pinker, S. 1999. Kids Say the Darnedest things! In Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, New York, NY: Basic Books, 189-210.

Click here for Assignment # 3, due Monday, November 3^rd.

Since you asked…

McCarthy, J. 1982. Prosodic structure and expletive infixation. Language, Vol. 58: 3, 574-590.

Movies (from Stephen Crain’s lab at the University of Maryland):

1. The acquisition of Negation in English (or how kids speak Swedish!).

2. Kids know everything about “or”.

3. 2 year olds and quantification with “every”.

4. The acquisition of WH-questions.

Weeks 9-10: Developing Pragmatic and Discourse skills (Hoff Chapter 6)

Optional: Winner. 1998. Chapters 1, 2, 9. (See Professor Gottfried for copies of readings, if interested.)

Week 11: Learning Multiple Languages (Hoff Chapter 8)

Au et al. 2002. Overhearing a language during childhood. Psychological Science 13:3, 238-243.

Week 12: Learning no Language: A Critical Period?

(Review Hoff, pp. 38-42, 62-71.)

Senghas, A. and Coppola, M. 2001. Children creating Language: How Nicaraguan Sign Language Acquired a Spatial Grammar. Psychological Science, Vol. 12, No. 4, 323-328.

Weeks 13-14: Acquisition in Special Populations (Hoff Chapter 7)

Tager-Flusberg. 2000. The challenge of studying language development in children with autism. In Methods for Studying Language Production, L. Menn and N. Ratner (eds.) Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. Pub.

(Handed out in class)

Information on ASL:

American Sign Language: Fact and Fiction.

Optional Reading:

Bellugi, U. et al. 2000. The neurocognitive profile of Williams Syndrome: A complex pattern of strengths and weaknesses. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12: Supplement, 7-29. (This article compares the language development of children with Williams Syndrome vs. Down Syndrome.)