Psycholinguistics

                                                     Psycholinguistics       

Dr. Babou Sekkal Meryem

Email:meryem.babou@univ-saida.dz 

Teaching Unit : Fundamental

Coefficient : 01                        

Level: Master I

(Didactics)

Credit:  02

Weekly time: 1h30

Aims and Objectives:

1-To develop understanding of the relationship between language and the processes of the brain and mind.

2- To develop detailed knowledge of basic sub-fields of psycholinguistics, including: the biological bases of language (language & the brain), speech perception, the lexicon, sentence processing, discourse, speech production and language acquisition.

3- To examine the methods used in psycholinguistic research and to interpret the types of results these methods have uncovered

4- To understand basic language production and perception data and how these data have contributed to the development of the major theories in psycholinguistics.

5- Understand how psycholinguistic experiments use predictor and outcome variables to test hypotheses and draw conclusions. 4. Read, comprehend, and summarize scientific articles in psycholinguistics.

6. Write clearly and concisely about the study of psycholinguistics.

Learning Outcomes:

1-List the major issues in the areas of speech perception, word recognition, sentence processing, text processing, reading and language acquisition.

2-Describe and demonstrate theoretical models of: speech perception, word recognition and lexical organization, sentence processing, language acquisition and reading

3-Develop a proposal for researching a specific question, based on knowledge of general issues and psycholinguistic methodology

4-Describe the methods used to experimentally test hypotheses in psycholinguistics

References

1-Bright, W. (1992).International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford University Press. Campbell R.N. (1980). Towards a redefinition of applied linguistics. In Kaplan R.B. (ed.) On the Scope of Applied Linguistics. Newbury House. Carter, R. (1993). Introducing Applied Linguistics. Penguin. Cook, G. (2003). Applied linguistics. Oxford University Press

2-Kuhl, P. K. (2007). Is speech learning 'gated' by the social brain? Developmental Science, 10, 110-120. [e-journals] [A key part of this builds on a study in PNAS by Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu 2003. See readings page.]

3-Maye, J., Werker, J. F., & Gerken, L. (2002). Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic perception. Cognition, 82, B101-B111. [e-journals] [widely cited - we will discuss this at length]

4-Stager, C. & Werker, J. (1997). Infants listen for more phonetic detail in speech perception than word-learning tasks. Nature, 388, 381-382. [Readings] [This is one of the primary readings for the section of the course on phonetic/phonological representations. A very short, but very important study. Why are younger infants better than older infants, even on native-language contrasts?]

5-Werker, J. F., Pons, F., Dietrich, C., Kajikawa, S., Fais, L., & Amano, S. (2007). Infant-directed speech supports phonetic category learning in English and Japanese. Cognition, 103, 147-162. [e-journals]

6-Vallabha, G. K., McClelland, J. L., Pons, F., Werker, J. F., & Amano, S. (2007). Unsupervised learning of vowel categories from infant-directed speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 13273-13278. [e-journals] [This is an explicit implementation of the idea that is implicit in the papers by Maye et al. 2002 and Werker et al. 2007.