Current Courses (Fall 2010)

 

FOUN 09X – The Way We Talk

Writing Intensive Foundation Seminar for First-Year Students

 

Description: Have you ever caught yourself saying something you didn’t mean or getting distracted and saying something nonsensical, like “I rode my bike tomorrow”, when you meant to say you rode it yesterday? Have you ever been caught with a word on the tip of your tongue, knowing exactly what you want to say, but not being able to say it? With somewhere between 40,000 and 75,000 words in your mental dictionary, finding the right thing to say is not a trivial matter. This class will explore how we find words, how we’re influenced by the speech of those around us, and the psychological and social impact our own words can have. In addition, we will follow political rhetoric, considering how words impact public opinion and policy, and we will look at how advertisers use words to influence consumer behavior.

 

LING 105 –Linguistic Analysis: Sounds/Words

 

Description: Linguistics, the scientific study of language, is perhaps the ultimate interdisciplinary intellectual enterprise, cutting across the humanities, social sciences, cognitive sciences, and biological sciences. This course is the first of a two - semester introduction to linguistics. It explains the universal categories and relations of sounds and words found in all languages, giving students insight into what skills must be mastered in learning any new language, including one's own as a child. The course also explores how language is processed, and how it is affected when the brain breaks down.

 

LING 225 – Language and the Brain

 

Description: With the development of neural imaging techniques has come an explosion of interest in how the brain works – what parts are active when you smile, when you think creatively, or when you see your friend eating an apple. As language is one skill that is unique to humans, we need to understand how the brain underlies our linguistic abilities. In doing so, we will cover topics such as animal communication, language innateness, neural structure and function, and language disorders. We will travel through the history of neurolinguistic research, from the earliest studies of language loss to the most recent imaging techniques, considering what areas we can isolate that are unique to spoken language, and we will examine how neural organization differs in bilinguals and in users of signed languages.  

 

 

Other Courses

 

LING 205 - Phonetics and Phonology

 

Description: This course provides an in-depth study of how speech sounds are produced and perceived, and of the abstract linguistic properties that govern how sounds are put together. We will explore the phonetics and phonology of a wide range of languages and will make applications to speech pathology, learning foreign languages, the teaching of reading, speech pathology, and linguistic theory. 

 

LING 230 – Psycholinguistics

 

Description: This course is all about how language happens - how we learn language, represent words in our mental dictionary, understand what other people say, and produce language ourselves. Beginning with how we recognize visual words, we will move to how we recognize speech, including issues of how we resolve ambiguity and recognize puns. We’ll then examine how speech is produced, paying special attention to speech errors and to disfluences (“like”, “um”, “uh”). Then we will investigate how children learn language, how adults learn foreign languages, the issues bilinguals face when juggling two languages in their heads, and the relationship between language and thought. An important theme running through the course will be on the experimental methodology used in psycholinguistics and the psycholinguistic models that have emerged over the past few decades, including neural network/connectionist modeling.

 

LING 326 - Language and Cognition (Cross-listed as PSYC 326 and co-taught with Prof. Ruth Tincoff)

 

Description: One of the fundamental questions in both linguistics and psychology is the degree to which language influences

thought. This question was famously popularized by Edward Sapir & Benjamin Lee Whorf, who argued that not

only does language influence how you interact with the world, but also that language can limit what you see. This

theory has been kept alive in literary criticism but was practically banished from both linguistics and psychology

as being “untestable”. In the last several years, however, the issue of linguistic determinism has experienced a

resurgence, and psychologists and linguists have worked together to examine fundamental issues about how the

language we acquire might influence how we think.

 

In this course we will focus on three broad issues: how does language shape how we see the world?, how does

language facilitate our ability to represent ideas and form complex thoughts?, and how does language influence

the category distinctions that we make? These issues draw on a wide range of research on language perception,

production, comprehension, acquisition, and evolution, including the role of computational models and neural

mechanisms. The prerequisite for this course is a 200-level course from Cluster A in psychology or a 200-level

linguistics course.

 

…and just for fun, a course blog from my Sentence Processing course at the University of Mary Washington that analyzes speech errors, both in comprehension and in production.