122253 AR Linguistics Course (Advanced 1-5) - Appl. & TEFL / CS (2015S)

In recent decades, there has been a close relationship between the study of grammar in linguistics and the study of language production in psycholinguistics. Linguists, often claiming that their models have psychological reality and/or that they are modelling the language user, have supplied hypotheses for psychologists of language to test. Psycholinguists, in turn, have made discoveries about language production that some linguists have found relevant for their own work. The course will provide a general introduction to research in language production, followed by a deeper treatment of (a) incrementality, the gradual build-up of utterances through time, coupled to the observation that people often start talking before they have fully planned what they are going to say, (b) structural priming, the effect of previous lexical items and syntactic structures on the ongoing utterance, and (c) advance planning, the look-forward aspect of language production. These themes will bring us into ever closer contact with the context of speech and with the orientation to interactants in dialogue (rather than the individual speaker) that has characterized the work of the last fifteen years or so. The course will end with a consideration of the current integration of both linguistics and language psychology in the embrace of cognitive science.