Week 1: Evolution of human language:
Lecture1: Introduction to the course: roadmap; Language evolution among humans; Child language acquisition and language evolution: the connecting threads
Lecture 2: theories of language evolution: Biological basis of evolution: gesture and neural basis of language evolution:
Lecture 3: Important scholars and their contribution: Noam Chomsky, Mark Hauser, Howes, Michael Corballis and Philip Lieberman.
Lecture 4: cultural basis of evolution: language as a cultural tool: Simon Kirby, Daniel Everett; vocal theory of language evolution
Lecture 5: latest status of the debate and research, future directions.
Week 2: Theories of language acquisition
Lecture 1: Child language development: prenatal, neonatal, childhood stages.
Lecture 2: Theories of language acquisition: Behaviorism: Nativism, cognitivism. Scholars and their contribution: Skinner, Bandura, Chomsky, Sellers, Vygotsky, Piaget
Lecture 3: important variables in child language acquisition: critical period hypothesis, theory of mind. br> Lecture 4: joint attention, body schematics
Lecture 5. methods of studying language acquisition among children: Looking Time, Preferential Looking Paradigm, Head Turn Preference Procedure, vocabulary assessment (language sampling, parent report & direct assessment), other modern tools like EEG.
Week 3: Phonology: Learning the sounds of language
Lecture 1: Stages of phonological development in human children: Prenatal, neonatal and childhood.
Lecture 2: Theories of speech perception: motor theory of speech perception, universal theory.
Lecture 3: attunement theory: perceptual assimilation mode, PRIMIR, native language magnet theory.
Lecture 4: speech segmentation: prosodic cues, phonotactic regularities, allophonic variations.
Lecture 5: Speech production: theories and findings.
Week 4: Acquiring Morphology
Lecture 1: Morphology: inflectional and derivational;
Lecture 2: children learning inflectional morphology; past tense debate; blocking hypothesis
Lecture 3: nativist and constructivist theories of morphology acquisition
Lecture 4: single route, dual route and connectionist models
Lecture 5: production
Week 5: Word and their meaning
Lecture 1: From phonological word form to word-meaning mapping; word comprehension:
Lecture 2: reference problem and extension problem;
Lecture 3: theories of innate linguistic bias,
Lecture 4: non-linguistic factors and syntactic bootstrapping,
Lecture 5: emergentist coalition model;
Week 6: Learning syntax: the sentence structures and their properties
Lecture 1: Nativist and constructivist theories of learning sentence structure
Lecture 2: syntactic development
Lecture 3: constraints on productivity
Lecture 4: morphosyntactic dependency
Lecture 5: movement dependency
Week 7: Learning more than one language: second language acquisition (SLA)
Lecture 1: What is SLA? Early approaches to second language learning (and bilingualism) and its impact.
Lecture 2: Parallels and differences between first and second language acquisition
Lecture 3: different theoretical approaches to understand SLA: Universal grammar
Lecture 4: Functional approaches
Lecture 5: psychological and neural aspects of SLA: complexity theory, learner differences
Week 8: Second language acquisition continued.
Lecture 6: social aspects of SLA : macro and microsocial aspects; social Vs tutored acquisition of L2; L2 Vs foreign language learning.
Lecture 7: childhood bilingualism: simultaneous
Lecture 8: childhood SLA: stages, research findings
Lecture 9: adult SLA: age, input, interaction,
Lecture 10: new domains: heritage language learning, language dominance, bilingual processing
Week 9: Role of nurture
Lecture 1: Perceptual input and language acquisition
Lecture 2 &3: nature of input: baby talk register/motherese,
Lecture 4 & 5: ecological brain
Week 10: Learning to communicate: The rules of the game
Lecture 1:Grice’s rules of communication; pre-verbal communication among children
Lecture 2: Verbal communication: Speech acts
Lecture 3: Scalar implicature
Lecture 4: Use of reference words
Lecture 5: Turn taking
Week 11: Brain and language development:
Lecture 1: brain development and main ‘language areas’
Lecture 2: Aphasia and epilepsy data
Lecture 3: language development and neural corelates
Lecture 4 & 5: bilingualism and its impact on brain and its activation pattern
Week 12: Language acquisition among atypical population
Lecture 1: language and other cognitive disorders: dependent or independent? Williams syndrome
Lecture 2: Specific language impairment, developmental dyslexia
Lecture 3: Autism spectrum disorder, Down’s syndrome
Lecture 4: Interventions
Lecture 5: concluding remarks and some latest trends
DOWNLOAD APP
FOLLOW US