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Fellowship Awarded
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Course Catalog | Introductory Courses | Core Courses/Electives | Advanced Courses |
Introductory Courses
10. Introduction to the Study of Language Linguistics
Mr. de Cuba, Ms. Fought, Ms. Landman, Ms. Paster. For students wishing to learn about the nature of language, including how language is structured at the levels of sound, form, and meaning; how does language determine our thoughts, our perception of the world; can animals learn to talk; and how our language reflects our culture, gender, and ethnicity.
11. Introduction to Cognitive Science
Ms. Burke, Mr. Thornton. Historical and contemporary views of the mind, from the perspectives of philosophy, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, logic and computer science. How does the mind acquire, structure, and make use of language? How does it make sense of emotional and sensory experience? What is consciousness? Topics include language, meaning, knowledge, thinking, remembering, self, and consciousness.
Core Courses and Electives
30. Computation and Cognition
Ms. Sood. Introduction to computer programming methods for cognitive science and the computational modeling of human cognition. The nature of computation, the relation between computation and intelligence, and various approaches from artificial intelligence will be explored. Intensive programming practice during weekly lab sessions. No previous programming experience required. Identical to Computer Science 30.
PHIL30. Knowledge, Mind and Existence
Mr. Kung. Introduction to some of the central issues regarding the nature of knowledge, the mind and reality. Topics include skepticism, the analysis of knowledge, mental causation, dualism, reductive and nonreductive physicalism, proofs for the existence of God and personal identity.
105. Syntax
Mr. de Cuba. What determines the sequencing of words in human languages? How can we explain syntactic variation within and across languages? Course emphasizes skills in critical thinking and syntactic argumentation in the framework of contemporary theories of syntax. Attention to Chomskyan revolution in theoretical linguistics and its recent developments.
106. Semantics
Ms. Landman. Language meaning is central to human knowledge and action, yet also seemingly forever elusive and contextual. What is the relationship between meaning and linguistic form and meaning and thought? How does meaning relate to inferences and logic?
107. Pragmatics: How to Do Things With Words
Mr. Atlas. A philosophical and linguistic discussion of language use and non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning. Topics from philosophy of language and linguistics: speech acts, presupposition, conversational implicature, context, and common ground, demonstratives and indexicals, topic/comment and focus, with applications to law and to psychology.
108. Phonology
Ms. Paster. Analyses of the organization of sounds in the world’s languages. Fundamental concepts in phonological theory and their relation to issues in articulatory and acoustic phonetics. Course focuses on feature systems, underlying representations, phonological rules and derivations.
109. Morphology
Ms. Paster. Provides an introduction to morphology, the study of how words are built from their component parts. Topics to be covered include methods of morphological analysis, the relationship between morphology and other areas of grammar, and modern theories of morphology.
PI 110. Language and Gender
Ms. Fought. The relation between cultural attitudes and language. How gender socialization is reflected in the structure of language at all levels, and the extent to which male/female patterns of language use might contribute to the creation and/or maintenance of given structures of power and solidarity. Students develop their own field work-based project.
PI 112. Sociolinguistics
Ms. Fought. How language reflects social patterns, including class, gender, ethnic, regional, and other differences. How these differences can lead to conflicts in interaction. Also, how children are socialized to use language in particular ways. Students will do a fieldwork project. Prerequisite: Ling/CogSci 10 or permission of instructor.
115. Bilingualism
Ms. Fought. How is the bilingual experience different from the monolingual one? How does the bilingual brain store and process language? How is the simultaneous acquisition of two languages different from acquiring a second language later? Is language mixing bad? Also investigates the special identity of bilingual speakers from social and psychological perspectives. Prerequisites: LGCS 10, 11 or PSYC 51.
PI 116. Languages in American Ethnic Minority Groups
Ms. Fought. Explore the language patterns of four American ethnic minority groups (African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans) with a focus on inter-ethnic communication. Topics include the role of language in defining identity, language use in the classroom, non-verbal elements of communications, traditions of joking, and bilingualism.
121. Psycholinguistics
Staff. How are we seemingly effortlessly able to produce and comprehend language in all of its complexity? Course provides introduction to research and theory on language processing. Focus on empirical studies of word recognition, sentence processing, discourse, and semantic interpretation, as well as language acquisition and breakdown. Prerequisite: LGCS 11.
PSYC 123. Language Development
Ms. Smiley. Normal and atypical language development; theoretical accounts of how development occurs. Focus on prelinguistic, phonological, semantic, and syntactic development in very young children, touching on bilingual acquisition. Social uses of language. Prerequisite: LGCS 10, 11 or PSYC 51.
125. Language in the Field
Ms. Paster. Where do we get the data on which linguistic theory is based? In this class, students learn hands-on how to systematically approach the study of an unfamiliar language. Languages vary from year to year; previous languages included Luganda, Twi, and Malayalam. May be repeated for credit.Prerequisite: LGCS 10.
149. Music Perception and Cognition
Mr. Cramer. Perceptual and cognitive processes involved in hearing music. Emphasis on concepts from music theory, criticism, history, and ethnomusicology that may be understood in terms of cognition. Topics include the perception of sound; pitch, rhythm, and other features as they figure in the perception of musical organization; melody; harmony; musical meaning and affect. Prerequisite: LGCS 11 or PSYC 160 or Music 80. Identical to Music 149.
PSYC 160. Perception and Cognition
Mr. Banks. Investigates how we use patterns of physical energy to perceive the world. Covers topics from sensation to cognition, including music, language communication, disorders of perception, attention, unconscious perception, and brain mechanisms in cognition. Laboratory arranged. Prerequisite: PSYC 51, LGCS 11, or equivalent.
PSYC 162. Memory and Language
Ms. Burke. Investigates the nature of human memory and how it interacts with language. Emphasis on architecture of memory and language systems and on memory processes in language comprehension and production. Evaluates research on how we remember, why we forget, memory without awareness, and language and memory disorders. Laboratory. Prerequisite: PSYC 51 or LGCS 11.
Advanced Courses
175. Seminar in Cognitive Science
Mr. Atlas. A philosophical, linguistic, and psychological examination of a central topic in cognitive science, e.g. metaphor, language and thought, modularity of the mind, concepts. Normally taken in the junior year.
PSYC 180H. Seminar in Consciousness and Cognition
Mr. Banks. What is the role of consciousness in perceiving, willing, thinking? How can the activity of a bunch of neurons result in conscious experience? Is free will consistent with deterministic neurophysiological processes in the brain? Seminar will cover recent approaches to these and related questions, with an emphasis on relevant scientific findings. Prerequisite: PSYC 160.
PSYCH 180J. Seminar on Language, Memory and the Brain
Ms. Burke. Current research on the interaction between brain and behavior in cognition. This year’s focus is on emotion, its effect on cognition and its neural substrate. Review of both neuroimaging and cognitive behavior research that investigates the nature of emotion and how it affects attention, memory and language. Analysis of how aging and brain damage change emotional responses and the interaction of cognition and emotion. Prerequisite: PSYC 162 or LGCS 11.
185L. Topics in Psycholinguistics
Mr. Thornton. Language production. Research and theory related to how we produce language. Focus on lexical and syntactic production. Topics also include conversation, dysfluency and speech errors, and age-related changes in processing. Topics vary from year to year. Prerequisite: LGCS 121, 123, or permission of the instructor.
PHIL 185M. Topics in Mind and Language: Thought, Talk and Mind
Mr. Atlas. What is it for a word/phrase/sentence to be meaningful, what role truth and inference play in understanding language, how language describes our mental states and their contents, consciousness and their first-person point of view, philosophical consequences for our theory of mind from computer science and neuroscience.
185P. Topics in Phonology
Ms. Paster. Advanced topics in phonological theory. Familiarizes students with current original research on one or more specific topics. Topics vary and may include Optimality Theory, phonetically grounded phonology, tonal systems, and the phonology-morphology interface. Prerequisite: LGCS 108.
185S. Topics in Syntax
Mr. de Cuba. Investigates various “hot topics” in current syntactic theory with an empirical focus on comparing a variety of different languages. Topics vary from year to year; possible topics include: argument structure, case and agreement, the syntax of scope, economy, head-movement, WH-movement, topics/focus structure and syntactic reconstruction. Prerequisite: LGCS 105.
185T. Topics in Semantics
Ms Landman. Investigates advanced topics in semantics and the syntax-semantics and semantics-pragmatics interface. Topics vary from year to year; possible topics include quantification, modality, tense, plurals, focus, degree semantics, modification, displacement and polarity. Prerequisite: LGCS 106.
187A,B. Tutorial in Linguistics and Cognitive Science
Mr. Atlas, Staff. Selected topics, determined jointly by the student and the tutor, conducted through frequent student papers evaluated in Oxford-style tutorial sessions. Prerequisite: written permission of instructor. 187A, Full course; 187B, half-course. May be repeated.
191. Senior Thesis in Linguistics and Cognitive Science
Staff. Individual theoretical research, or laboratory experiment, for fourth-year students under faculty supervision. Course or half-course
