In this course, we will examine the ongoing cognitive revolution in linguistics and psychology. For much of the 20th century, psychologists viewed language as a “behavior” or learned habit, one that children picked up largely by imitating adults, and linguists were concerned with describing individual languages, without much attention paid to what languages had in common. But following the seminal work of Noam Chomsky (and others) in the 1950s and 60s, a new conception of language emerged, one that focuses on the universal properties underlying all human languages, on the cognitive mechanisms underlying the acquisition of language and how language is produced and comprehended, and on language as a uniquely human capacity, a biological feature of the species Homo sapiens. Although the focus will be on these big-picture questions, we will also dive deep into both theoretical and experimental investigations of how language is represented in the mind, of the processes by which children acquire words and grammar, of the question of whether other species have any linguistic abilities, and of the nature of the system known as Universal Grammar.