An investigation of the psychological representations and processing of words. Topics include: the extraction of words from speech; lexical access and production; the induction of morphological and phonological regularities in word learning; decomposition of morphologically complex words; frequency effects in morphological processing; storage vs. computation in the lexicon; the past tense debate; morphological change. This course makes extensive use of linguistic corpora. Students will also be familiarized with experimental design issues in the psycholinguistic study of the lexicon.

The second half of a year-long introduction to the formal study of natural language syntax. Topics to be covered include grammatical architecture; derivational versus representational statement of syntactic principles; movement and locality; the interface of syntax and semantics; argument structure; and other topics. The emphasis is on reading primary literature and discussing theoretical approaches, along with detailed case-studies of specific syntactic phenomena in different languages.

Second half of a year-long introduction; continues LING 530. Topics to be surveyed include syllable structure and moraic theory; the prosodic hierarchy; the properties and representation of geminates; templatic and prosodic morphology; reduplication and emergence of the unmarked; and metrical phonology (properties of stress, foot typology, and issues of constituency). Emphasizes hands-on analysis of a wide range of data.

A hands-on signal and image processing course for non-EE graduate students needing these skills. We will go through all the fundamentals of signal and image processing using computer exercises developed in MATLAB. Examples will be drawn from speech analysis and synthesis, computer vision, and biological modeling.

This is a methodology course, which focuses on how to conduct phonetics research using very large speech corpora. Topics include scripting and statistical techniques, automatic phonetic analysis, integration of speech technology in phonetics studies, variation and invariability in large speech corpora, and revisiting classic phonetic and phonological problems from the perspective of corpus phonetics.

Speech communities as a focus for the understanding of language evolution and change: language variation in time and space. The relationship between language structure and language use; between language change and social change. Populations as differentiated by age, sex, social class, race, and ethnicity, and the relationship of these factors to linguistic differentiation.

An introduction to articulatory and acoustic phonetics; phonetic transcription; basic concepts and methods of phonological analysis.

This course continues the introduction to Experiments in the study of meaning in natural language from LING 455. A large focus will be practical aspects of designing and implementing experiments, while covering a range of current topics from the experimental semantics and pragmatics literature (and exploring new avenues) along the way, e.g., pronouns and definite reference, presuppositions, quantifiers and domain restriction, generics. We'll start with some basic aspects of experimental design, including counter-balancing, controlling for confounds, utilizing fillers, as well as a range of key experimental task paradigms, such as simple truth- value judgments and picture sentence matching, acceptability ratings, reading time studies, and visual world eye tracking. For implementation, we will introduce the PCIbex platform at https://farm.pcibex.net and its relevant functionalities. Students will select a topic area, either individually or in small groups, and start from a survey article or recent journal paper to familiarize themselves with current issues. Next, they will formulate their own question, decide on a suitable task paradigm, and begin fleshing out a full experiment implementation, with the goal of collecting data at the end of the semester (if at all possible). The project will then be written up in a term paper. This provides students with the opportunity to engage in a scientific investigation of their own early on in their career in a domain that is easily accessible and yet central to the general enterprise of the cognitive sciences.

This course covers the linguistic structure of American Sign Language (ASL), including its phonology (articulatory features, phonological constraints, nonmanuals), morphology (morphological constraints, compounds, incorporation, borrowing), and syntax (syntactic categories, basic phrase structure, common sentence types), Also discussed are the topics of classifiers and deixis. In keeping with the comparative perspective of linguistic theory, parallels and differences between ASL and other (primarily spoken) languages are pointed out where appropriate. Historical and sociolinguistic issues are addressed where they are relevant to elucidating linguistic structure. Though the course focuses on ASL, it necessarily touches on issues concerning sign languages more generally, notably the possible effects of modality (sign vs. speech) on linguistic structure and the implications of the signed modality for general linguistics.

In this course, students construct their own language, one that is compatible with what is known about possible human languages. To this end, the course investigates language typology through lectures and examination of grammars of unfamiliar languages. Topics include language universals, points of choice in a fixed decision space, and dependencies among choices. Prerequisite: Students who have taken LING 140: Construct a Language are not eligible to enroll in LING 242.