When a flu pandemic strikes, who should get vaccinated first? What's our best strategy for minimizing the damage of global climate change? Why is Philadelphia racially segregated? Why do most sexually reproducing species have two sexes, in roughly even proportions? These and many other scientific and practical problems require us to get a handle on complex systems. And an important part of deepening our understanding and sharpening our intuitions requires us to think with models, that is, to use models in our deliberations about what to believe and what to do.Modeling is the construction and analysis of idealized representations of real-world phenomena. This practice is ubiquitous across the sciences, and enters into many practical decisions from setting international policy to making everyday business decisions. The principal aim of this course is to acquaint students with the modeling process and, especially, to help students learn how to think critically about modeling results, as well as how to construct, analyze, and verify such models. Students who take this course will learn about the varied practices of modeling, and will learn how to construct, analyze, and validate models. Most importantly, students who take this course will learn how to critically evaluate the predictions and explanations generated by models, whatever the source of these results. While we will familiarize students with a variety of types of models, our primary focus will be on computer simulations, as they are increasingly relied upon for scientific research and practical deliberation. In addition to studying general methodological discussions about modeling, this will be a "hands on," laboratory-based course. Students will practice manipulating, modifying, and analyzing models, as well as constructing models from scratch. The conduct of the course will be heavily influenced by SAIL (structured active in-class learning) ideas. As such, in most class meetings there will be a short lecture and Q&A session, followed by individual and group exercises, which will be discussed later in the class. As an essential feature of learning about modeling we will actually design and build (program) models, which we then study. NetLogo will be the main programming environment. Students will learn to program in it and build agent-based models. NetLogo was designed to be easy to learn and we assume no prior programming experience. For approximately the first 2/3 of the course we will focus on learning NetLogo and building and analyzing models in it. During approximately the last 1/3 of the semester, students will work on their term projects and the course presentations will focus on modeling

An introduction to language acquisition in children and the development of related cognitive and perceptual systems. Topics include the nature of speech perception and the specialization to the native language; the structure and acquisition of words; children's phonology; the development of grammar; bilingualism and second language acquisition; language learning impairments; the biological basis of language acquisition; the role in language learning in language change. Intended for any undergraduate interested in the psychology and development of language.

This course is an introduction to current syntactic theory, covering the principles that govern phrase structure (the composition of phrases and sentences), movement (dependencies between syntactic constituents), and binding (the interpretation of different types of noun phrases). Although much of the evidence discussed in the class will come from English, evidence from other languages will also play an important role, in keeping with the comparative and universalist perspective of modern syntactic theory.

This course focuses on experimental investigations of speech sounds. General contents include: the fundamentals of speech production and perception; speech analysis tools and techniques; and topics in phonetic studies. The course consists of integrated lectures and laboratory sessions in which students learn computer techniques for analyzing digital recordings.

While communication is abundant throughout the living world, the human system we call language seems to stand out. Indeed, if humans themselves can be said to stand out among other species on Earth, it may well be language that played the crucial role in getting us here. So where does language come from? This question has been dubbed the hardest problem in science, but the last three decades have seen a notable renaissance in scientific attempts to answer it. This seminar will examine both the results of this multidisciplinary endeavor and the tools that have been employed in it. It will involve discussions of the nature of language and its place among other communication systems and will touch on fundamental questions of what it means to be human.

This is a course on how language relates to other cognitive systems. We will discuss the question of whether and how the language one speaks affects the way one thinks, the relation between words and concepts, the link between language acquisition and conceptual development in children, and the potential role of language in shaping uniquely human concepts. The course incorporates cross-linguistic, cross-cultural and developmental perspectives and combines readings from linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and other fields within cognitive science.

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the basic concepts of sentence structure in a "pretheoretical" framework, demonstrating that any natural human language must have certain structures and must choose the rest from a restricted universal set. The textbook, which was written for this course, discusses each set of structures with examples from six languages: English, Spanish, Latin, Biblical Hebrew, Mandarin, and Navajo. The instructor will add languages from among those with which the students are familiar, within the limits of his competence. This course will help students not only to learn foreign languages, but also to improve their own writing skills, by making the structures that they must use more explicit and intelligible.

The historical origin of writing in Sumer, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica; the transmission of writing across languages and cultures, including the route from Phoenician to Greek to Etruscan to Latin to English; the development of individual writing systems over time; the traditional classification of written symbols (ideographic, logographic, syllabic, alphabetic); methods of decipherment; differences between spoken and written language; how linguistic structure influences writing, and is reflected by it; social and political aspects of writing; literacy and the acquisition of writing.

The historical origin of writing in Sumer, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica; the transmission of writing across languages and cultures, including the route from Phoenician to Greek to Etruscan to Latin to English; the development of individual writing systems over time; the traditional classification of written symbols (ideographic, logographic, syllabic, alphabetic); methods of decipherment; differences between spoken and written language; how linguistic structure influences writing, and is reflected by it; social and political aspects of writing; literacy and the acquisition of writing.

The historical origin of writing in Sumer, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica; the transmission of writing across languages and cultures, including the route from Phoenician to Greek to Etruscan to Latin to English; the development of individual writing systems over time; the traditional classification of written symbols (ideographic, logographic, syllabic, alphabetic); methods of decipherment; differences between spoken and written language; how linguistic structure influences writing, and is reflected by it; social and political aspects of writing; literacy and the acquisition of writing.