Fundamentals of Language Acquisition

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ABOUT THE COURSE:How humans acquire language is not a question only linguists ask; it is a mystery to many as how children learn the nuances of the most complex grammatical structures effortlessly that adults and machines find difficult. This is a key topic within Linguistics and all students of the discipline require an understanding of the nuances of the same. Not just Linguistics, this is important from the perspective of child development as well as research in intervention in language teaching tools etc. The course will cover the main theories of first language acquisition, acquisition of the components of language like phonology, morphology, words, syntax, semantics, communication skills, second language acquisition as well as language acquisition among atypical children. to give a holistic understanding of the topic at hand. Each of these domains will be thoroughly discussed, with adequate theoretical understanding as well as empirical data from research.INTENDED AUDIENCE: UG/PG/PhD students from any discipline and early career researchers dealing with language related courses or teaching. Also applicable for students of developmental psychology, speech and language disorder, cognitive science as well as industry specializing in the domain of language and social interventions for atypical children suffering from cognitive disorders/ delay.INDUSTRY SUPPORT: Companies dealing with Language learning/teaching material creation, child development, language disorders and interventions are relevant.

Syllabus

Week 1: Evolution of human language:

Lecture1: Introduction to the course: roadmap; Language evolution among humans; Child language acquisition and language evolution: the connecting threads
Lecture 2: theories of language evolution: Biological basis of evolution: gesture and neural basis of language evolution:
Lecture 3: Important scholars and their contribution: Noam Chomsky, Mark Hauser, Howes, Michael Corballis and Philip Lieberman.
Lecture 4: cultural basis of evolution: language as a cultural tool: Simon Kirby, Daniel Everett; vocal theory of language evolution
Lecture 5: latest status of the debate and research, future directions.
Week 2:Theories of language acquisition

Lecture 1: Child language development: prenatal, neonatal, childhood stages.
Lecture 2: Theories of language acquisition: Behaviorism: Nativism, cognitivism. Scholars and their contribution: Skinner, Bandura, Chomsky, Sellers, Vygotsky, Piaget
Lecture 3: important variables in child language acquisition: critical period hypothesis, theory of mind. br>Lecture 4: joint attention, body schematics
Lecture 5. methods of studying language acquisition among children: Looking Time, Preferential Looking Paradigm, Head Turn Preference Procedure, vocabulary assessment (language sampling, parent report & direct assessment), other modern tools like EEG.
Week 3:Phonology: Learning the sounds of language

Lecture 1: Stages of phonological development in human children: Prenatal, neonatal and childhood.
Lecture 2: Theories of speech perception: motor theory of speech perception, universal theory.
Lecture 3: attunement theory: perceptual assimilation mode, PRIMIR, native language magnet theory.
Lecture 4: speech segmentation: prosodic cues, phonotactic regularities, allophonic variations.
Lecture 5: Speech production: theories and findings.
Week 4:Acquiring Morphology

Lecture 1: Morphology: inflectional and derivational;
Lecture 2: children learning inflectional morphology; past tense debate; blocking hypothesis
Lecture 3: nativist and constructivist theories of morphology acquisition
Lecture 4: single route, dual route and connectionist models
Lecture 5: production
Week 5:Word and their meaning
Lecture 1: From phonological word form to word-meaning mapping; word comprehension:
Lecture 2: reference problem and extension problem;
Lecture 3: theories of innate linguistic bias,
Lecture 4: non-linguistic factors and syntactic bootstrapping,
Lecture 5: emergentist coalition model;
Week 6:Learning syntax: the sentence structures and their properties

Lecture 1: Nativist and constructivist theories of learning sentence structure
Lecture 2: syntactic development
Lecture 3: constraints on productivity
Lecture 4: morphosyntactic dependency
Lecture 5: movement dependency
Week 7:Learning more than one language: second language acquisition (SLA)

Lecture 1: What is SLA? Early approaches to second language learning (and bilingualism) and its impact.
Lecture 2: Parallels and differences between first and second language acquisition
Lecture 3: different theoretical approaches to understand SLA: Universal grammar
Lecture 4: Functional approaches
Lecture 5: psychological and neural aspects of SLA: complexity theory, learner differences
Week 8:Second language acquisition continued.

Lecture 6: social aspects of SLA : macro and microsocial aspects; social Vs tutored acquisition of L2; L2 Vs foreign language learning.
Lecture 7: childhood bilingualism: simultaneous
Lecture 8: childhood SLA: stages, research findings
Lecture 9: adult SLA: age, input, interaction,
Lecture 10: new domains: heritage language learning, language dominance, bilingual processing
Week 9:Role of nurture

Lecture 1: Perceptual input and language acquisition
Lecture 2 &3: nature of input: baby talk register/motherese,
Lecture 4 & 5: ecological brain
Week 10:Learning to communicate: The rules of the game

Lecture 1:Grice’s rules of communication; pre-verbal communication among children
Lecture 2: Verbal communication: Speech acts
Lecture 3: Scalar implicature
Lecture 4: Use of reference words
Lecture 5: Turn taking
Week 11:Brain and language development:

Lecture 1: brain development and main ‘language areas’
Lecture 2: Aphasia and epilepsy data
Lecture 3: language development and neural corelates
Lecture 4 & 5: bilingualism and its impact on brain and its activation pattern
Week 12:Language acquisition among atypical population

Lecture 1: language and other cognitive disorders: dependent or independent? Williams syndrome
Lecture 2: Specific language impairment, developmental dyslexia
Lecture 3: Autism spectrum disorder, Down’s syndrome
Lecture 4: Interventions
Lecture 5: concluding remarks and some latest trends