Course Description
In this course, we will review a question at the heart of linguistics and cognitive science, which brings together researchers across fields: how does a child acquire the meaning of words? This question has fascinated researchers for hundreds of years, resulting in testable hypotheses and a wealth of empirical data that shed light on we map meaning onto form, and how we build up our lexicon. We highlight a key set of topics that demonstrate the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics, the link between morphosyntax and semantics, the roles of linguistic and extralinguistic information, and the intimate relationship between language and cognition.
Area Tags: Acquisition, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Psycholinguistics, Cognitive Science
(Session 2) Monday/Thursday 9:00-10:20
Location: ILC S140
Instructors: Kristen Syrett & Athulya Aravind
Kristen Syrett is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS) at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. She is also an Associate Dean in the SAS Office of Undergraduate Education and an advocate for gender equity and inclusive pedagogy. Kristen directs the Rutgers Laboratory for Developmental Language Studies (https://sites.rutgers.edu/language-studies/). Parallel to her language acquisition research, she also conducts experimental research in semantics, pragmatics, and prosody with adults. She regularly teaches Language Development, Pragmatics, and courses on topics in Acquisition and Psycholinguistics.
Athulya Aravind is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. She co-directs the MIT Language Acquisition Lab (https://www.childlanguage.mit.edu/). In addition to her language acquisition research, she works on syntactic and semantic theory and teaches courses on Language Acquisition and Syntax. Kristen and Athulya have a joint line of research funded by a collaborative NSF grant entitled, “Context dependence across categories: Bridging developmental, experimental, and theoretical perspectives.”
