Language Development

This course will explore the linguistic and communicative development of children using concepts from Cognitive Psychology and Psycholinguistics (Psychology of Language). Specifically, we will examine pre-linguistic communication, word emergence, vocabulary development, semantic, pragmatic, morphological and syntactic development, and the development of narrative skills. The process of language acquisition, as well as speech production and comprehension, and the organization of the mental lexicon will be studied from modern psycholinguistic perspectives. The course will also cover the role of interpretive models (behavioral, biological, and cognitive) of language development in language processing theories. Furthermore, children’s linguistic development will be examined in terms of the phonological, grammatical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels of the language system. Finally, the factors necessary for understanding and producing language in children, in relation to adults’ perceptual and productive language processing, will be examined.