Psycholinguistics Cognitive Science 050.333 / 050.633 William Badecker Tuesdays, 1:30 - 3:45pm Bloomberg, Room 168 Web address: www.cog.jhu.edu/courses/333/ Instructor and TA Contact Class Schedule Readings Grading Ethics

Spring 2008

Course Description

This course provides a broad survey of current research on natural language processing. Emphasis is on how our grammatical knowledge is brought to bear in language processing in combination with information about the environment. Topics include speech perception, the recognition and production of words, the planning and production of sentences, and how listeners understand spoken sentences. Evidence concerning how we integrate linguistic and non-linguistic information in normal language production and comprehension will be drawn from speech errors, eye-tracking and Event-Related Brain Potential (ERP) measurements, elements of processing performance that derive from acquired language impairments, and various other measures of lexical access and relative processing complexity.

Central themes include

(1) the nature of mental representations and computations underlying language comprehension and production;

(2) how grammatical knowledge and world knowledge interact in the construction of these representations;

(3) how comprehension is affected by the incremental unfolding of linguistic forms; and

(4) how sentence production can be understood in terms of staged, incremental planning processes.

Requirements

There will be two take-home exams for this course, each counting 35% towards your final grade. In addition to the midterm and final exams, there are two brief and simple writing assignments summarizing papers from the psycholinguistics literature. Each report counts 15% toward your final grade. A list of papers that you can select from will be handed out in class.

Instructor Contact

William Badecker badecker@jhu.edu

office: Krieger 149
office hours: Monday, 1:00 to 3:00pm

(and by appointment)

Phone 410-516-5330

TA:

Charley Beller beller@cogsci.jhu.edu
office: Krieger 136
office hours: Wednesdays 11:00am-1:00pm
Phone 410-516-2887

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Class Schedule

Week	Topic	Reading
1 [1-29-08]	Introduction: Representational/computational theory of mind; levels of linguistic description; the competence/performance relation	+ Note (2/11/08): the syllabus has been revised to reflect the textbook edition available in the campus bookstore (2nd edition).
2 [2-05-08]	Speech Perception: the problem of invariance; categoricity in perception; the role of lexical knowledge	Harley, Chapter 8+
3 [2-12-08]	Phonological processing in auditory lexical access and speech production: phonological alternations and allophonic variation; processing units	Harley, Chapter 2 to page 33+ ; Gow article*
4 [2-19-08]	Lexical Processing (monomorphemic words): lexical frequency; priming; basic access models	Harley, Chapter 6 & Chapter 7 to page 206+
5 [2-26-08]	Lexical Morphology: accommodating the open-ended character of the lexicon; inflection and regularity First written assignment due today	McQueen & Cutler chapter
6 [3-04-08]	Sentence Processing: the nature of the processing problem Mid-term take home exam distributed in class	Harley, Chapter 9+
7 [3-11-08]	Processing Local Dependencies Mid-term exams due at start of class	Christianson et al. article*; Spivy et al. article*
8 [3-25-08]	Processing Long-Distance Dependencies	Traxler & Pickering article*
9 [4-01-08]	Anaphora & Discourse	Arnold et al. article*; Harley, Chapter 11+
10 [4-08-08]	Sentence Production: incremental phrasal planning	Harley, Chapter 13+
11 [4-15-08]	Sentence Production (continued): two stage model of lexical production Second written assignment due Friday, 4-18-08	Bock et al. article*
12 [4-22-08]	Neuropsychological studies of language: assumptions; morphology as a case study	Allen & Badecker chapter
13 [4-29-08]	Language acquisition Final Take-home exam distributed in class	Harley, Chapter 4+

Due date and time for take-home final: noon on Monday, May 12, 2008.

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Required Readings

Text:

Harley, T. 2001. The Psychology of Language: From Data to Theory (2nd edition). New York, NY: Psychology Press.

Articles:

Allen, M., & W. Badecker. 2000. Morphology: The internal structure of words. In B. Rapp (ed.), The Handbook of Cognitive Neuropsychology: What Deficits Reveal about the Human Mind (pp. 211-232). Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.

Arnold, J., Eisenband, J., Brown-Schmidt & Trueswell, J. 2000. The rapid use of gender innformation: evidence of the time course of pronoun resolution from eyetracking. Cognition, 76, B13-B26.[*]

Bock, K., Eberhard, K., Cooper Cutting, J., Meyer, A., & Schriefers, H. 2001. The attractions of verb agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 43, 83-128. [*]

Christianson, K., Hollingworth, A., Halliwell, J., & Ferreira, F. 2001. Thematic roles assigned along the garden path linger. Cognitive Psychology, 42, 368-407. [*]

Gow, D. 2001. Assimilation and anticipation in continuous spoken word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 133-159.[*]

McQueen, J., and A. Cutler. 1998. Morphology in word recognition. In A. Spencer and A. Zwicky (eds.), The Handbook of Morphology (pp. 406-427). Oxford: Blackwell.

Spivey, M, Tannenhaus, M., Eberhard, K., & Sedivy, J. 2002. Eye movements and spoken language comprehension: Effects of visual context on syntactic ambiguity resolution. Cognitive Psychology, 45, 447-481. [*]

Traxler, M., & Pickering, M. 1996. Plausibility and the processing of unbounded dependencies: An eye-tracking study. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 454-475.[*]

* The articles followed by an asterisk are available electronically through the MSE Library electronic resources: Follow the link for ScienceDirect (Elsevier).

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Recommended Reading:

Pinker, S. 1994. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York, NY: Harper.

Grading
Class attendance will not be monitored by the instructor. However, students are reminded that they are responsible for material that is covered in class lectures, even if that material does not appear in course readings.

Writing assigments must be turned in on or before the due date. Late assignments may incur a penalty of at least one grade deduction per day. Writing assignments and take home exams must reflect the student's own effort alone.

There will be no alternate scheduling for exam or other deadlines except in the event of documented illness or family emergency. No exceptions will be made to accommodate holiday or vacation travel plans.

Ethics
The strength of the university depends on academic and personal integrity. In this course, you must be honest and truthful. Ethical violations include cheating on exams, plagiarism, reuse of assignments, improper use of the Internet and electronic devices, unauthorized collaboration, alteration of graded assignments, forgery and falsification, lying, facilitating academic dishonesty, and unfair competition.

Participants in this course are expected to adhere to the undergraduate code of ethics. The university requests that you report any violations that you witness to the instructor. You may consult the associate dean of student affairs and/or the chairman of the Ethics Board beforehand. See the the Ethics Board web site for more information. Details concerning the ethics code are found in the on-line undergraduate academic manual.

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