Foundations of Language Acquisition

Course goals

Aim of the course is to provide insight into theoretical and methodological issues in the domain of language acquisition; to engage students in scientific discussion of theoretical, empirical and methodological issues in current language acquisition research; to provide them with a solid and informed background for further specialisation in this area.

Content

This foundations course provides the theoretical and empirical foundation for current  developments in  acquisition research driven by linguistic theory. It does so by focusing primarily on (morpho-)syntactic and semantic phenomena taken to t illustrate the relation and tension between the  "logical problem of language acquisition", i.e., the observation that the knowledge children acquire goes far beyond the input to which they are exposed, and the "problem of actual language development", i.e., how and why children pass through certain developmental stages in their acquisition of their first language or – in the case of (simultaneous) bilingualism – languages. Questions to be addressed include: How is (monolingual and bilingual) first language acquisition guided by the principles of linguistic theory and general cognitive growth? And can the answers and explanations offered be naturally extended to adult and child second language acquisition, when acquisition starts with knowledge of one language (partly) in place?  Topics will include: acquisition of argument structure, of referentential dependencies acquisition of scope relations;  role and rise of functional categories;   transfer; effect of age of onset; the role of input quantity and quality, plus other child-internal and child-external factors.
 

Additional information

Early Exit option for international exchange students (5 ECTS)
 
Exchange students who are required to return to their home university before January, are allowed to choose an Early Exit option for this course. The Early Exit option means that students can finish the course before the Christmas break, receiving 5 ECTS for the course. Students must make arrangements with the course coordinator at the start of the course.