Syllabus
●Theoretical part: Topics:
Introduction to psycholinguistics; history and position of psycholinguistics; theories of language origin;
Language acquisition; critical period; language and aging; loss of language (19/10)
Communication: animal and human; verbal and non-verbal; sign language; properties of human language (12/10)
Language production and comprehension (16/10)
Language skills (speaking, writing, reading,listening); bilingualism (30/11)
Language, mind and brain; language centres; language disorders; memory; mental lexicon; cognitive linguistics (7/12)
●Presentation of reviews (14/12)
●Presentation of individual psycholinguistic experiments (21/12;4/1)
Annotation
In the course, the language is treated as a unique product of cognitive processes of the human mind, differing from other types of communication. The course gives insight into how language enables people to organize their thoughts and categorize their experience, which makes the subject indispensable even for language teachers. Themes:
1. Introducction, history and position of psycholinguistics, research objectives, key concepts in psycholinguistics
2. Human vs animal communication; nonverbal communication; sign language
3. Biological origina of language. Characteristics of language and language competence
4. First language acquisition
5. Memory; information processing; mental lexicon
6. Comprehension and production; reprezentation of meaning
7. Production and comprehension of discourse. Teory of schemes. Informativity
8. Language skills (speaking, listening, reading, writing)
9. Brain and language; language disorders or impairments; language loss;
10. Bilingualism
11. Research and experiments in psycholinguistics