Athulya Aravind: First Language Acquisition
This course focuses on the process by which native speakers of a language acquire the ability to speak and understand that language. We will cover some of the major results in the study of first-language acquisition, concentrating on morpho-syntax, semantics and pragmatics. The findings primarily come from English, but cross-linguistic differences in the phenomena of interest and corresponding differences in acquisition patterns are also discussed. Throughout, we will locate the developmental findings within a broader set of issues about learning/learnability: What is the initial state of grammatical knowledge? What, if any, are intermediate states? What evidence do children need to proceed through stages, and what learning algorithms do they use to make sense of this evidence?
You can find slides and readings on the website.
When you click on the link there for SCCC, you will be prompted for a password. The password is ‘babytalk’.