Course information

Meeting time. 2:00–3:30pm Tuesdays and Thursdays, in room SOC B65.

Instructor. Paul Hagstrom, 621 Commonwealth Ave., room 105. Email: hagstrom@bu.edu (likely to get a quick response). Phone: 617–353–6220 (x3–6220). Office hours: TBA

Prerequisites. CAS LX 250 (Introduction to Linguistics), or consent of instructor. Further courses in Syntax, Semantics, Morphology, or language acquisition are not required in advance and will not be presupposed here—concepts and assumptions from these areas (beyond what was covered in Introduction to Linguistics) will be introduced as needed.

Short description. General introduction to the study of language acquisition within the framework of generative grammar. Topics include acquisition of syntax, semantics, and morphology; differences and similarities in development across languages; experimental methodology and analysis; relation between first and second language acquisition.

Course description:

Human children acquire their first language(s) quickly and uniformly, yet not all languages are English. In this course, we’ll look at aspects of how both English and non-English languages are acquired, using our theoretical understanding of the adult languages to describe the development of language knowledge precisely and gain insight into how differences in the target languages shape the acquisition process. We’ll look closely at learnability and models of language acquisition in terms of parameter setting, current ideas on what parameters are and how they might be set. We’ll review studies and methodologies used to test hypotheses about acquisition, and design some of our own. Topics will include major results in syntax, semantics, morphology, and their interaction, as well as some exploration of innovation and creolization, acquisition of signed languages, and the relation between early first language acquisition and later second language acquisition. Throughout the course, emphasis will be on using the tools of theoretical linguistics to describe and understand what develops during acquisition, and on using results from the acquisition of a wide range of languages to reveal what developmental diversity there is.

Course Requirements. Readings. There will be readings from the textbook and/or from the literature for each class session. Homework. There will be weekly homework assignments, concentrated mostly in the first two-thirds of the course, including a lab exercise using the CHILDES database, and the design of a small experiment. Final project. There is a final project for this course, which involves designing, running, and writing up a small experiment testing some property of language acquisition. The project is broken up into several milestones, during the last third of the course. Just before spring recess, a project proposal will be due, with the basic outline of the property to be investigated and the means by which it will be explored. At the end of March, a (possibly revised) design version is due. Data must then be collected and a short status report is due in early April, and another in mid-April. A complete (but short, around 10 pages) final project writeup will be due at the end of the course, as well as a brief presentation of the project in one of the last class periods. There is no final exam.

Homework. Whenever feasible, homework (or project proposals, or final papers) can be emailed to me at hagstrom@bu.edu. Be aware that if you use special fonts, they will sometimes not come through. PDF and text-only documents are safest, but Microsoft Word, RTF, Postscript, LaTeX files will work. Please don’t send a WordPerfect file, I have never managed to find a way to open them properly. Or, you know, just hand in a paper copy. If I can’t read the file you send me, it doesn’t really count as having been handed in, so if there’s a risk of a font problem, try to send it to me early so I can verify that I can read the file.

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

Textbook. [There likely will not be a textbook, still TBD.]

Readings. This course will sometimes rely on outside readings from the linguistics literature (journal articles, manuscripts, and excerpts from books). These readings will be available in the hallway outside my office, in a folder labeled LX540. You may take the readings out for no more than an hour to make a personal photocopy, and then they should be returned to the folder so that others may photocopy them.

CAS Student Academic Conduct Code. As a member of a CAS course, it is essential that you read and adhere to the CAS Student Academic Conduct Code. In particular, several types of plagiarism (any attempt to represent the work of another as your own) are defined by this academic conduct code. A copy is available in CAS 105.