Overview

Psycholinguistics stands at the crossroads of linguistics, psychology, computer science and neuroscience. The basic objective of psycholinguistics is to understand how the human mind/brain supports the learning, comprehension and production of language.

This course is a two-semester core graduate sequence in psycholinguistics, covering issues and techniques relevant for research in language acquisition, language processing and neurolinguistics. The aim is to provide a hands-on introduction to the state-of-the-art in psycholinguistics, covering the following general questions:

• Knowledge: What is the current state of our understanding of language learning and processing? How far are we towards having a neurobiologically explicit model of language?
  This will be studied through readings, lectures and in-class discussions, and written homework assignments.
• Techniques: What experimental and analytic techniques have been used to learn these things?
  This will be studied over the course of a series of lab assignments and more extensive research projects (Spring Semester), which together will provide hands-on experience in designing and running experiments, analyzing data, searching databases and manipulating computer models.
  The course will also provide an opportunity to develop research skills such as efficient literature searches, abstract writing, etc.
• Frontiers: What areas of psycholinguistics are still poorly understood, and where can we hope to make significant progress in coming years?

Requirements

Grades may not be your top concern, but here goes...

There will be no exams for this course. The focus of the course is on reading, discussing, writing and doing throughout the semester, and hence your entire grade will be based upon this.

If you want to get the maximum benefit from this class (i.e. learn lots and have a grade to show for it at the end), you will do the following...

1. Come to class prepared, and participate (15% of grade).

Being prepared means having read the assigned article(s) before coming to class, and having jotted down your initial thoughts or questions about the article(s). Although there are many readings for this course, you are not expected to read them all from beginning to end. An important skill to develop is the ability to efficiently extract ideas and information from writing. Particpating in class discussions is valuable because it makes you an active learner and greatly increases the likelihood that you will understand and retain the material. You should also feel free to contact the instructor outside of class with questions that you have about the material.

2. Think carefully and write clearly in assignments (85% of grade).

The assignments will come in a variety of formats. In lab assignments you will get hands-on experience with various research techniques in psycholinguistics, plus experience in reporting the results of said experiments. In writing assignments you will think and write about issues raised in class and in the assigned readings. The writing assignment may sometimes be due before the material is discussed in class: this will help you to be better prepared for class and to form your own opinions in advance of class discussion. In your writing it is important to write clearly and provide support for claims that you make.

f you are worried about how you are doing in the course, do not hesitate to contact the instructor, either by email (colin@umd.edu) or by phone (301-405-3082) or by meeting in person. Email is generally the most reliable method.

Grade scale

A	80-100%	B-	60-65%
A-	75-80%	C+	55-60%
B+	70-75%	C	50-55%
B	65-70%	C-	45-50%

Note that even in the A range there is plenty of room for you to show extra initiative and insight.

Teamwork

Written work should be submitted individually, unless the assignment guidelines state otherwise or you have made prior arrangements with the instructor, but you are strongly encouraged to work together on labs and homeworks in addition to group projects. Academic honesty includes giving appropriate credit to collaborators.

Although collaboration is encouraged, collaboration should not be confused with writing up the results of a classmate's work - this is unacceptable. If you work as a part of a group, you should indicate this at the top of your assignment when you submit it.

Schedule

Times & Places

• Classes: Mondays, Wednesdays, 12:00 - 1:30, Marie Mount 1108B
• Labs will be available as broadly as possible for completion on campus or at home. The primary location for labs will be the CNL Lab suites in 1413 and 3416 Marie Mount Hall.

Topics

Note: this schedule is tentative, and is likely to change, in order to accommodate interesting directions of discussion and new readings. Updates will be marked on this page and/or announced in class. Note that there will be no class on Monday October 27th, and the status of class on Nov 17th & Nov 19th is yet to be confirmed.

Readings etc.

This list will be updated periodically.

There is no textbook for the course. Readings for the course will mostly be drawn from recent handbooks or journal articles. One objective of the course is for you to become able to read, understand and critically evaluate the primary literature in experimental linguistics.

Readings will be available electronically in PDF format, with very few exceptions. Please be sparing in your use of printing.

Fall '08 Readings

Introduction

Miller, G. A. (2003). The cognitive revolution: A historical perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 141-144. Short and interesting, from somebody who was there from the 'beginning'. [readings]

Jackendoff, R. (2002). Foundations of Language. Oxford University Press. [Section 1 (ch 1-4) provides a very nice discussion of the cognitive commitments of 'mainstream generative linguistics' and some desiderata for integrating linguistic, psychological, and neuroscientific levels of analysis.] [readings]

Gleitman, L. & Newport, E. (1995). The invention of language by children: environmental and biological influences on the acquisition of language. In: L. Gleitman & M. Liberman (eds) Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol 1 (2nd edn.) , 1-24. [readings: A very readable review of the evidence for language as a specialized biological system. We won't discuss this in detail in the class, but this is material that you should know and love! ]

Categories and Speech Perception

Introductory Material

Jusczyk, P. 1997. The Discovery of Spoken Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Readings] [Chapters 3-4 are available. Chapter 3 provides a good introduction to some central issues in speech perception; chapter 4 provides a very good overview of research on infant speech perception through the mid-90s.]

Infant Development and Category Learning

Werker, J. (1995). Exploring developmental changes in cross-language speech perception. In L. Gleitman & M. Liberman (eds) Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol 1 (2nd edn.), 87-106. [Readings] [This paper is the best starting point for this section of the course. It presents an overview of Werker's views on phonetic development up to 1995, including a straightforward study of her important cross-language experiments from the early 1980s.]

Werker, J. (1994). Cross-language speech perception: Developmental change does not involve loss. In: Goodman & Nusbaum (eds.), The Development of Speech Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp:93-120. [Readings.] [Useful for Lab 1. This paper reviews in more details the reasons why Werker adopts a structure-adding view of phonetic development.]

Stager, C. & Werker, J. (1997). Infants listen for more phonetic detail in speech perception than word-learning tasks. Nature, 388, 381-382. [Readings] [This is one of the primary readings for the section of the course on phonetic/phonological representations. A very short, but very important study. Why are younger infants better than older infants, even on native-language contrasts?]

Swingley, D. & Aslin, R. (2002). Lexical neighborhoods and the word-form representations of 14-month olds. Psychological Science, 13, 480-484. [e-journals][how much do infants know about word forms?]

Maye, J., Werker, J. F., & Gerken, L. (2002). Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic perception. Cognition, 82, B101-B111. [e-journals] [widely cited - we will discuss this at length]

Werker, J. F., Pons, F., Dietrich, C., Kajikawa, S., Fais, L., & Amano, S. (2007). Infant-directed speech supports phonetic category learning in English and Japanese. Cognition, 103, 147-162. [e-journals]

Vallabha, G. K., McClelland, J. L., Pons, F., Werker, J. F., & Amano, S. (2007). Unsupervised learning of vowel categories from infant-directed speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 13273-13278. [e-journals] [This is an explicit implementation of the idea that is implicit in the papers by Maye et al. 2002 and Werker et al. 2007.]

Kuhl, P. K. (2007). Is speech learning 'gated' by the social brain? Developmental Science, 10, 110-120. [e-journals] [A key part of this builds on a study in PNAS by Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu 2003. See readings page.]

Brain Representations & Non-native Speech Perception

Mills, D. L., Prat, C., Zangl, R., Stager, C. L., Neville, H. J., & Werker, J. F. (2004). Language experience and the organization of brain activity to phonetically similar words: ERP evidence from 14- and 20-month olds. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16, 1452-1464. [on-line]

Phillips, C. (2001). Levels of representation in the electrophysiology of speech perception. Cognitive Science, 25, 679-699. [Very relevant to what we will discuss in class - the paper presents a view of the relation between infant phonological development and adult electrophysiology.] [on-line]

Näätänen, R., Lehtoskoskl, A., Lennes, M., et al. (1997). Language-specific phoneme representations revealed by electric and magnetic brain responses. Nature, 385, 432–434. [readings]

Dehaene-Lambertz, G., Dupoux, E., Gout, A., et al. (2000). Electrophysiological correlates of phonological processing: A cross-linguistic study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12, 635-647. [This is not a primary reading, but it presents a nice study of phonological perception at the level of syllables; Japanese speakers hear 'phantom vowels' when presented with syllable-structures that are illegal in Japanese, e.g. ebzo; do their brains register detection of a contrast between ebzo and ebuzo, and at what time?] [on-line]

Kazanina, N., Phillips, C., & Idsardi, W. (2006). The influence of meaning on the perception of speech sounds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103, 11381-11386. [on-line]

Kabak, B. & Idsardi, W. (2004). Speech perception is not isomorphic to phonology: The case of perceptual epenthesis. In press, Language & Speech. [readings]

Abstraction, Symbols, and Neural Networks

General

Plunkett, K. & Elman, J. (1997). Exercises in Rethinking Innateness: A Handbook for Connectionist Simulations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [hard copy; readings]

Marcus, G. (2001). The Algebraic Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [readings]

Past Tense

Pinker, S. (1995). Why the child holded the baby rabbits: a case study in language acquisition. In L. Gleitman & M. Liberman (eds) Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol 1 (2nd edn.), 107-133. [readings]

Ullman, M., Corkin, S., Coppola, M., et al. (1997). A neural dissociation within language: evidence that the mental dictionary is part of declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural system. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 266-276. [e-journals]

Pinker, S., & Ullman, M. (2002a). The past and future of the past tense. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 456-463. [readings]
McClelland, J. & Patterson, K. (2002a). 'Words or Rules' cannot explain the regularity in exceptions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 464-465. [readings]
McClelland, J. & Patterson, K. (2002b). Rules or connections in past tense inflections: What does the evidence rule out? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 465-472. [readings]
Pinker, S. & Ullman, M. (2002b). Combination and structure, not gradedness, is the issue. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 472-474. [readings]

Computational Models

Elman, J. 1993. Learning and neural networks: the importance of starting small. Cognition, 48, 71-99. [hard copy]

Rohde, D. & Plaut, D. 1999. Language acquisition in the absence of explicit negative evidence: how important is starting small? Cognition, 72, 67-109. [on-line]

Seidenberg, M. 1997. Language acquisition and use: learning and applying probabilistic constraints. Science, 275, 1599-1603. [readings]

Studies of Infants

Saffran, J., R. Aslin & E. Newport. 1996. Statistical learning by 8-month old infants. Science 274, 1926. [readings]

Marcus, G., S. Vijayan, S. Bandi Rao & P. Vishton. 1999. Rule learning by seven-month old infants. Science, 283, 77-80. [readings]

Pena, M., Bonatti, L., Nespor, M., & Mehler, J. (2002). Signal-driven computations in speech processing. Science, 298, 604-607. [readings]
Seidenberg, M., MacDonald, M., & Saffran, J. (2002). Does grammar start where statistics stops? Science, 298, 553-554. [readings]

Yang, C. (2004). Universal grammar, statistics, or both? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 451-456. [e-journals]

Generation & Selection 1: Words

Marslen-Wilson, W. (1987). Functional parallelism in spoken word recognition. Cognition, 25, 71-102. [hard copy]

Simpson, G. 1994. Context and the processing of ambiguous words. In M. Gernsbacher, ed. Handbook of Psycholinguistics. NY: Academic Press. pp.359-374. [hard copy]

Forster, K. 1990. Lexical processing. In: D. Osherson & H. Lasnik (eds.), Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol. 1 (1st edn.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [hard copy]

Boland, J. & Cutler, A. (1996). Interaction with autonomy: Multiple output models and the inadequacy of the Great Divide.Cognition, 58, 309-320. [e-journals]

Pylkkänen, L. & Marantz, A. (2003). Tracking the time-course of word recognition with MEG. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 187-189. [e-journals]

Kutas, M. & K. Federmaier. (2000). Electrophysiology reveals semantic memory use in language comprehension .Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4 , 463-470. [e-journals]

Lau, E. F., Phillips, C., & Poeppel, D. (2008). A cortical network for semantics: (de)constructing the N400. Submitted review article.

Whitney, C. & Lavidor, M. (2004). Why word length matters only in the left visual field. Neuropsychologia, 42, 1680-1688. [e-journals]

Abstraction in Early Syntax

Poeppel, D. & Wexler, K. (1992). The full competence hypothesis of clause structure in early German. Language, 69, 1-33. [hard copy]

Phillips, C. (1995). Syntax at age 2: Cross-linguistic differences. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 26, 325-382. [readings]

Wexler, K. (1998). Very early parameter setting and the unique checking constraint: A new explanation of the optional infinitive stage. Lingua, 106, 23-79. [readings]

Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language: A Usage-based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (excerpts). [hard copy]

Further readings on syntactic priming in children

Parsing: Accuracy & Incrementality

It's likely that this material will come at the start of next semester ...

Miller, G. A. (1962). Some psychological studies of grammar. American Psychologist 17, 748-762. Also in Jakobovits & Miron 1967. [hard copy]

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [chapter 1][hard copy]

Townsend, D. & Bever, T. (2001). Sentence Comprehension: The Integration of Habits and Rules. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [chapter 2] [CogNet - online]

Phillips, C. (2004). Linguistics and linking problems. In M. Rice & S. Warren (eds.), Developmental Language Disorders: from Phenotypes to Etiologies. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 241-287. [readings]

Supplemental: Fodor, J. A., Bever, T. G., & Garrett, M. (1974). The Psychology of Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. [chapters 5-6] [hard copy]

Accuracy

Ferreira, F., Bailey, K. G. D., & Ferraro, V. (2002). Good enough representations in sentence processing. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11, 11-15. [e-journals]

Kim, A., & Osterhout, L. (2005). The independence of combinatory semantic processing: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Journal of Memory and Language, 52, 205-225. [e-journals]

Boland, J. E., Tanenhaus, M. K., Garnsey, S. M., & Carlson, G. N. (1995). Verb argument structure in parsing and interpretation: Evidence from wh-questions. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 774-806. [e-journals]

Sturt, P. (2003). The time-course of the application of binding constraints in reference resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 542-562. [e-journals]

Phillips, C. (2006). The real-time status of island constraints. Language, 82:4

Aoshima, S., Phillips, C., & Weinberg, A. (2004). Processing filler-gap dependencies in a head-final language. Journal of Memory & Language, 51, 23-54. [e-journals]

Phillips, C., Wagers, M., & Lau, E. F. (2008 - in prep). Selective fallibility in computing linguistic dependencies. To appear in Language and Linguistics Compass.

Lab Assignments

The lab assignments are a major component of the course, and are designed to give you first-hand experience with experimental and computational techniques used in psycholinguistic research.

1. Speech Perception: Effects of Native Language and Processing Time (Psyscope)

Part A: Running the experiment, collecting the data; Analyzing, Reporting, using Pivot Tables, Graphing the results of the experiments, calculating sensitivity scores
Part B: Measures of higher-level encoding

2. Neural Networks and Language (Tlearn Simulator)

Part A: Introduction to Neural Networks
Part B: Modeling the English Past Tense
Part C: Syntax - Simple Recurrent Networks
Additional files: Answers to Questions -- Windows Notes

3. Lexical Access and Priming (Psyscope/Presentation)

Part A: Lexical Decision
Part B: Priming

4. Language Acquisition: CHILDES database search

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Help!

If you get into difficulty it is entirely appropriate to seek help. Contact the instructor, or a classmate, or another student, or the internet or library for assistance. If you are having a problem that is adversely affecting your participation in class, you should contact the instructor at:

Colin Phillips
1413F Marie Mount Hall

phone: (301) 405-3082
email: colin@umd.edu
www.ling.umd.edu/colin