Psychology of Language (10 credit points)

1. What is psychology and what is language? Introducing the psychology of language. How do we define language and where did it come from?

2. An overview of linguistics (the study of language). How do we describe language? Methodological approaches and an overview of language representation in the brain.

3. How does language develop in children? Examining theories of child language development; developmental language pathologies and insights into language from children.

4. Bilingualism and second language acquisition: early vs. late bilingualism; the critical period in light of bilingualism; bilingualism in the brain.

5. Written vs. spoken language: lexical processing; production and representation; word recognition and comprehension; brain damage and language aphasias.

6. Sentence processing and parsing; comprehension and literacy in the brain; language lateralisation and literacy; reading and speech processing; reading comprehension disorders

7. The Whorfian hypothesis; pidgins and creoles; sign languages and language in the deaf and blind.

8. Models of meaning and conceptual structure; perception and language; social and cognitive approaches and the issue of modularity; pathologies affecting language and cognition.

9. Recap of the major issues throughout the course.

10. Overview of the structure of a language system; new and future directions in the psychology of language.

By the end of this course, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate knowledge of various theories of how people are able to acquire, use, and understand language(s);

• Understand the experimental and other evidence that support these theories;

• Demonstrate knowledge of the major experimental techniques for investigating language processing;

• Apply their knowledge to wider discussion of how people use and understand language and what happens when the system breaks down.

Essential:

• Harley, T., 2013. The Psychology of Language: from Data to theory. 4th ed. Hove; New York: Psychology Press.

Recommended:

• Field, J., 2003. Psycholinguistics: A resource book for students. New York, NY: Routledge.

• Forrester, M.A., 1996. Psychology of language: a critical introduction. London: Sage.

• Fromkin, V.A., Rodman, R. and Hyams, N., 2006. An Introduction to Language, London: Heinle.