Four-year-olds typically can’t tie their shoes (properly), make themselves a sandwich (edible), or draw you a (reliable) map to get to the subway. But they typically have mastered many if not most of the central features of the language around them, a task many think is rather more complex. In this course we will explore the most salient features of children’s acquisition of their mother tongue(s) and their relation to general development and to the human language faculty. We will also review competing current theories and learn how to do research with children through hands-on practice.
This course will use lecturing to introduce you to fundamental concepts in first language acquisition, and different in-class and out-of-class activities to integrate knowledge and develop practice in doing research. Although my particular orientation is linguistic, much of the research we’ll discuss comes from fields like developmental psychology and education. As I said above, this course has no prerequisites. However, if you have taken other courses with material you can connect to acquisition, feel free to discuss that material in class.
