160108 VO Introduction to Psycholinguistics (2015W)

The course will introduce main topics and methods in psycholinguistic research. Students will be acquainted with models of language acquisition (nativist versus constructivist), comprehension and production (modular versus interactionist). By the end of the course they are expected to be able to relate these to linguistic and more general cognitive models, and give a critical evaluation of them. Special emphasis is going to be placed on the mental reality of linguistic representations of different linguistic models, and of different levels of organization in language structure. We will also cover problems concerning the biological foundations of language, language evolution, and developmental and acquired disorders of language.