In this course, we’ll examine the process by which children acquire their first language(s), beginning with the coos of infants and ending with vocabulary development in the early school years. Language is an extraordinarily complex system, one which language scientists still do not completely understand – so how is it that children are already well on their way to mastering it before they can even tie their shoes? Perhaps more than any other facet of human development, this has been a central question in the centuries-old debate about whether children are born as blank slates and learn everything from experience, or whether they are born with knowledge about how the world works.  

Along the way, we'll consider biological and social components of language acquisition, including whether other animal species have language abilities, how children connect sounds to concepts, the kinds of assumptions that children make about what kinds of meanings words can have, how children learn to use words in sentences, how bilingual / multilingual children assemble multiple grammars and vocabularies simultaneously, and most importantly, how linguists and psychologists go about studying these phenomena, including both experimental methods and observational studies.