How do people form social impressions of others based on subtle patterns in their linguistic behavior? How do people shape their use of language to adapt to different social contexts and reflect their own identities? And what kinds of cognitive processes allow people to learn and use these sociolinguistic skills? Sociolinguists are increasingly turning to experimental methods to answer these exciting but complex questions. In this class, students will gain an up-to-date familiarity with major results in the experimental sociolinguistics literature, an awareness of the wide range of methods for sociolinguistic experimentation, and hands-on experience with the tools needed to create sociolinguistic experiments.

Speech: its linguistic transcription, its quantitative physical description, and its relationship to the categories and dimensions of language structure and use. The physical basis of speech: acoustics, vocal tract anatomy and physiology, hearing and speech perception, articulation and motor control. Phonetic variation and change. Prosody: stress, intonation, phrasing speech rate. Phonetic instrumentation, the design and interpretation of phonetic experiments, and the use of phonetic evidence in linguistic research, with emphasis on computer techniques. Introduction to speech signal processing. Speech technology: introduction to speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech coding. This course will emphasize the phonetics of natural speech, and its connections to issues in other areas of linguistics and cognitive science.

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.

Selected topics either in Indo-European comparative linguistics or in historical and comparative method.

How do minds work? This course surveys a wide range of answers to this question from disciplines ranging from philosophy to neuroscience. The course devotes special attention to the use of simple computational and mathematical models. Topics include perception, learning, memory, decision making, emotion and consciousness. The course shows how the different views from the parent disciplines interact and identifies some common themes among the theories that have been proposed. The course pays particular attention to the distinctive role of computation in such theories and provides an introduction to some of the main directions of current research in the field. It is a requirement for the BA in Cognitive Science, the BAS in Computer and Cognitive Science, and the minor in Cognitive Science, and it is recommended for students taking the dual degree in Computer and Cognitive Science.

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.

Speech: its linguistic transcription, its quantitative physical description, and its relationship to the categories and dimensions of language structure and use. The physical basis of speech: acoustics, vocal tract anatomy and physiology, hearing and speech perception, articulation and motor control. Phonetic variation and change. Prosody: stress, intonation, phrasing speech rate. Phonetic instrumentation, the design and interpretation of phonetic experiments, and the use of phonetic evidence in linguistic research, with emphasis on computer techniques. Introduction to speech signal processing. Speech technology: introduction to speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech coding. This course will emphasize the phonetics of natural speech, and its connections to issues in other areas of linguistics and cognitive science.

Detailed study of topics in syntax and semantics, e.g., pronominalization, negation, complementation. Topics vary from term to term.