SPAN 597 Seminar in Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is increasingly an important branch of linguistics, supported by the exponential growth of the use of experimental methods in linguistic research, to examine the cognitive processes underlying human language. In this seminar we will examine psycholinguistics through the lens of bilingualism. Bilingualism is of interest for a number of reasons. First, despite the prevalence of monolinguals in the United States, most people of the world are bilingual. To develop a truly universal account of human cognition, it is essential to gain a detailed understanding of the relationship between language and thought in individuals who speak and comprehend multiple languages. It will be essential that research on basic cognitive functions in bilinguals examine both the course and the consequence of second language acquisition. The primary goal of this course will be to introduce the core themes of psycholinguistics, using multilingual speakers as the case study. We will begin with issues concerning the acquisition of core linguistic levels, continue with lexical (e.g. how do multilingual speakers process cognates [piano] and false cognates [fin]?) and sentence processing (e.g. How do the two languages influence each other in predictive processing or when resolving syntactic ambiguity?), and finish with the cognitive neural consequences of bilingualism on general cognition, examining both production and comprehension throughout. A secondary goal for the course is to help students become familiar with current experimental methods used in psycholinguistic and increasingly in traditional linguistic research, e.g. self-paced reading tasks, syntactic priming, eye-tracking methodologies, EEG recordings, and fMRI.