CAS LX 454
GRS LX 754
Spring 2018

Acquisition
of Syntax

Course information

Acquisition of Syntax, Spring 2018

(CAS LX 454, GRS LX 754)

Meeting time MWF 11:15-12:05, CAS 424
Instructor Paul Hagstrom
Email hagstrom@bu.edu
Phone (617) 353-6220
Office 621 Commonwealth Ave., Rm. 105
Office Hours WF 2:30-3:30; R 1:30-2:30 (and by appointment)

Prerequisite: CAS LX 321 / GRS LX 621 (Syntax: Introduction to Sentential Structure) or consent of instructor.

Course Description: The syntactic system of languages spoken by adult native speakers is amazingly complex, but yet remarkably uniform. Syntactians largely focus on characterizing these adult grammars and how they can differ from one another, but there is another important question to ask: how do children come to have knowledge of these complex systems? Some argue that the adult systems are so complex as to be “unlearnable” and so must in some sense be “built-in” rather than acquired solely from the environmental input. What evidence is there of this? It is easily observed that children “talk funny,” in ways that are unlike adults, but how specifically do children’s grammars differ from adults’? How do they develop over time? Are some types of knowledge acquired before others? Do children follow uniform paths? What effect does the specific language a child acquires have on the course of development? How do the answers to these questions differ when we consider acquisition of a second language? How does acquisition of a second language as a child differ from acquisition of a second language as an adult?

In this course, we will explore these questions focusing on a few different phenomena in syntactic acquisition that have been influential in recent years. In addition to reviewing the results to date, and understanding what they tell us about the acquisition of syntax, we will also discuss issues of experimental design, implementation, and analysis. This will allow us to consider the results we discuss more critically, but also will be put into use in a course project. Each student will identify a question of interest, formulate a means of answering the question by testing a hypothesis using data from language acquisition, run a small-scale experiment, analyze the resulting data, and report on it.

Learning objectives

Students completing this course will:

  • Gain an understanding of the complexity of language acquisition, specifically in syntax
  • Learn a broad sample of influential results and hypotheses that inform the field’s current understanding of the process of acquiring syntax
  • Learn how to construct, run, analyze, and report experimental work by running a small-scale study of the student’s own devising
  • Gain experience relating to the profession of Linguistics, constructing a paper to be presented in a conference setting
  • Learn how to use existing corpora (such as the CHILDES database) to test hypotheses in acquisition
  • Gain understanding of how first language acquisition compares to second language acquisition, and the effect of age on the process

Course Requirements

Readings. Readings will be assigned to be read prior to most class sessions, to be read beforehand. Students registered for GRS LX 754 will have additional readings (often the entire paper, for which only excerpts are required for CAS LX 454, but sometimes additional related readings).

Homework. Weekly homework assignments for the first half of the course. Students registered for GRS LX 454 will have an additional weekly assignment pertaining to the readings.

Course project. There is a course project, which involves designing, running, and writing up a small experiment testing some property of syntactic acquisition. There are several milestones along the way, taking the place of homework in the second half of the semester. The project is described in more detail below.

Course project

This course has a final project that will occupy the second half of the semester, proceeding in several steps:

CHILDES lab. A “practice experiment” using a predefined question, analyzing data from the CHILDES database.

Proposal. A proposal for the course projcect, including the basic hypothesis you will be testing and a sketch of how the hypothesis can be tested by collecting and analyzing data.

Experimental deisgn. This is the actual design of the experiment you will run. Details will depend on the type of experiment, but would include things like the actual questions to be presented to subjects or coding techniques and corpora to be tested.

Data collection. A status report outlining the data collected, prior to analysis.

Data analysis. Report on the results of analyzing the data collected, including at least a sketch of the interpretation of the data in the context of the hypothesis being tested.

Presentation. An in-class presentation at the end of the semester of the experiment and results. For students taking CAS LX 454, these will be 10–15 minute presentations; for students taking GRS LX 754, to accommodate the broader scope of the projects, presentations will be 20–25 minutes.

Final paper. A write-up of the overall experiment in the standard format, as covered in the CHILDES lab. For students taking CAS LX 454, the paper is expected to be 10–15 pages long; for students taking GRS LX 754, 15–25 pages.

Late assignments. Late assignments will not be accepted without prior arrangement.

Electronic communication

We live in an electronic age. You (unlike me) have always lived in an electronic age. You are expected to be reachable via your BU email address. The central communication center for the course is the course blog. Announcements, notes on readings, homework errata, and other information will be posted there on a regular basis, and things that are posted there will be assumed to have been communicated. Homework assignments can be sent (whenever feasible, and unless otherwise indicated) by email, or handed in on paper. It is your responsibility to ensure that electronically submitted material is in a readable format—if there is a question (for example, if you use a special font or an obscure word processor), send it early for verification. Unreadable submissions do not count as having been handed in.

Readings

There is no textbook for this course; the readings will be usually in the form of articles or chapters from various books.

Grading Scheme

Homework (including course project milestones) 65%
Course project: presentation and write-up 25%
Regular attendance, participation 10%

CAS/GRS Academic Conduct Code

It is essential that you read and adhere to the CAS Student Academic Conduct Code. Graduate students must also follow the policies of the GRS Academic Conduct code.

https://www.bu.edu/cas/current-students/undergraduate/academic-conduct-code-2/

https://www.bu.edu/cas/files/2017/02/GRS-Academic-Conduct-Code-Final.pdf