Although 4/18 is officially a “Monday” my schedule is such that I’m not going to be able to have my “Monday” office hours on Wednesday. If you need to meet with me, just send me email and we can probably work out a workable time.
Design isn’t due tomorrow
So I realized that it says on the schedule that the experimental design is due tomorrow, but don’t worry about that, I will talk about it tomorrow and it won’t be due until after the weekend. It doesn’t really make sense to hand something in before I’ve talked about what I had in mind. Sorry about that!
CHILDES lab is live
Ok, the CHILDES lab is now online and I think it is ready to do.
With respect to what happened in class, with the searches not working, I don’t really know. I tried it again at home and it seemed to be working. Maybe I was just failing to see a typo or something. But I think the command examples that you have in the lab exercise should work, let me know if you have trouble.
The lab can be done just fine without installing anything on your own machine, you can do it all with a web browser that has the ability to copy and paste the results into a file. So, in principle, I think you could actually do this on an iPhone, although I wouldn’t recommend it.
You may want to bring your laptop
By the way, since I’m going to demo some of the things you can do with CHILDES in class on Tuesday and/or Thursday, you might find it useful/interesting to bring a laptop or iPad or other modern internet-enabled device, so you can follow along. Not required, of course, but it will probably be more interesting and “stick” better if you’ve actually done it yourself.
The main link to the CHILDES transcript browser, which is what we’re going to mainly use, is this: http://bit.ly/childes. You can try it out on the device of your choice. It appears to work fine on my iPad and iPhone, though it’s a bit hard to deal with on an iPhone-sized screen.
Schedule, website updated
Ok, I have now had a chance to at least take a preliminary pass at bringing the web site up to date. The readings page and the schedule page are now in sync, and good up to about a week in the future.
I’ve made a few changes to the organization of the later part of the semester, so let me just mention the differences:
- I have reduced the number of presentation days from three to two. We should be able to fit five 15-minute presentations in a single class meeting, so the last day of classes now has five, and the penultimate day of classes has four. The remaining time on the penultimate day is for course evaluations.
- I have moved the project proposal back a bit, so it is not due until the Thursday after spring break (March 22), and I have shortened the time devoted to the CHILDES project a bit, putting one more homework assignment in between the CHILDES lab and the start of work on the final project.
That’s it, I think, other than a bit of shuffling. I wanted to move the project proposal a little bit later, just so we’d have a little bit more chance to see some potential topic areas before you need to choose something to pursue. And the time that was allotted to the CHILDES lab was actually excessive before.
#2 due 2/2.
As mentioned in class, despite what’s actually printed at the top of homework #2, the homework is actually due on Groundhog Day.
Homework 0
The first “homework” comes in two parts. The first part is just a couple of demographic questions for you. You can email your answers to me. If I did this right, you can click here to start your email with the questions already there. Do this anyway, even if you know that I know you, I might not know all of this stuff. But the questions are:
What other Linguistics courses (or related courses) have you taken?
What are your (actual or planned) major/minors?
What languages (other than English) do you know, and how well?
What language(s) did you grow up speaking?
Do you prefer to be called something other than what I see in the class list?1
Anything else that seems relevant?
The second part is to comment on this post. Feel free to just say “present.” But I want you to have had the opportunity to use the comment function, and I want to know that it is working right.
1Within reason, that is. “Your Excellence” is not a valid answer here.
Textbook (also e-available)
There is a textbook for this course, which is Jürgen M. Meisel (2011), First and Second Language Acquisition, Cambridge University Press. The BU bookstore should have copies, or you can acquire it on Amazon or elsewhere.
Note that there is a Kindle edition (as well as an electronic edition from CUP), and at least right now the Kindle edition is significantly cheaper, so it’s worth considering that as an option.
Future home of the LX540 course site
This is just a place holder for the moment, but you are looking at the future home of the Spring 2012 edition of CAS LX 540, Acquisition of Syntax. Some course information is already available on the various pages, though some of it is just lifted from last year (although the course will be somewhat different this year from last year).