In the first block of this course, you will first get to know psycholinguistics as a scientific discipline. In order to be able to understand it, it is necessary to have a basic idea of ​​what the two sciences between which it is located - namely linguistics and psychology - actually are. So we will ask what are the basic starting points of linguistics and psychology. What is language and what is the mind? The lecture will outline the current paradigm of scientific linguistics, which is based on the ideas of Noam Chomsky. Subsequently, through the work of the cognitive scientist David Marr, we will examine how psycholinguistics fits into the overall project of language study.

In the second part, we will deal with the problem of language acquisition. Children can acquire their native language with incredible speed and seemingly without much effort. How to explain this is a big mystery, because the grammar of every human language is very complex. In the lecture, we will discuss the question of whether language is an innate ability or not.

In the last part, we will discuss how children learn new words. Please study the assigned literature on this topic and prepare answers to the following questions:

1. What is statistical learning and how do children use it to segment words? (Saffran et al., 1996)
2. What is cross-situational world learning?
3. Explain the design and results of the Smith & Yu (2008) study.
4. What predictions does the Propose-but-Verify theory make? (Trueswell et al., 2013)
   
5. Which model of word learning do you think is better - Propose-but-Verify (also known as Hypothesis Testing hypothesis) or Cross-situational World Learning (Associative Learning hypothesis)?
   

Reading list