Language acquisition is at the centre of both linguistic theory and everyday language use, but the acquisition process itself is difficult to observe as it unfolds within the human mind. The goal of this course is to survey a diverse range of experimental methods for getting at the nature of language acquisition, primarily of phonological and also morpho-syntactic grammars. The biggest questions we will tackle are:
- how do linguists study linguistic competence via experimental behavior?
- how can an experimental study hope to test or compare theoretical claims?
- which kinds of tasks tap into which kinds of grammatical knowledge?
Methods will include (but are not limited to) wug tests, nonword repetition, induced speech errors, lexical decision, grammaticality judgments, word learning and segmentation, similarity ratings, eyetracking, and ERPs and other neurological measures.
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