Robert Thornton
Office: Mason 110D
Phone: 607-1602 (x71602)
Email: robert.thornton@pomona.edu
Office hours: Tuesdays and Wednesdays 10:30-12:00 and by appointment
Textbook and readings
P. Fletcher, & B. MacWhinney (Eds.) (1995). The Handbook of Child Language. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
In addition to readings from the text, selected articles will be available for download through the course website.
Course Requirements: Your grade will be determined by class participation, weekly short reaction papers, an assignment using the CHILDES corpora, and a final squib:
Participation 20%
Weekly Reaction Papers 40%
CHILDES Assignment 15%
Squib 25%
Class Attendance/Participation: Class meetings will consist of both lecture and discussion. Although the exact mix will depend on the topic at hand, discussion is encouraged whenever any of us would like it. If you know ahead of time that you will miss a class meeting, please let me know. For some courses, your showing up isn’t necessarily important as long as you can pass the tests. This isn’t one of those courses. Participation is the most important part of this course. Although I’ll have a good idea of how much you’ve actually participated, you’re really the best judge of that. So, toward the end of the semester, I’ll ask you to assign yourself a participation grade. We’ll talk more about this when the time comes, but the general criteria I’d like for you to have in mind are: (1) how prepared were you for each class and (2) how much did you contribute to the discussion. I don’t want to penalize people who are too hard on themselves or reward people who are two easy in that regard, so I reserve the right to adjust these grades (e.g., if you don’t ever show up but give yourself an “A”), but will only do so sparingly. You’re giving yourself 20% of your grade.
Reaction papers: Each week, you should write a short (i.e., 1-2 pages) paper based on your reactions to the readings for that week. These are informal papers that don’t need definite conclusions. The format isn’t important. These should be emailed to me by Sunday night. Half credit for late papers.
More on the CHILDES assignment and squib later in the semester.
Class Schedule and Readings
| Tues 8/31 | First Class | |
| Thus 9/02 | Overview | Chomsky (1987) |
| Tues 9/07 | Maturation of Grammar | Wexler (1990) |
| Thus 9/09 | Emergent Models | Tomasello (2000) |
| Tues 9/14 | Negative Evidence | Bohannon et al. (1988); Gordon (1990) |
| Thus 9/16 | Socialization | Ely & Berko Gleason (1995); Newport et al. (1977) |
| Tues 9/21 | Vocal Capabilities | Locke (1995); Petitto & Marentette (1991) |
| Thus 9/23 | Phonology | Menn & Stoel-Gammon (1995) |
| Tues 9/28 | Segmentation | Saffran et al. (1996); Jusczyk (1999) |
| Thus 9/30 | Word Meaning | Barrett (1995) |
| Tues 10/05 | Word Meaning | Gillette et al. (1999); Bloom (1999) |
| Thus 10/07 | Overregularization | Plunkett (1995) |
| Tues 10/12 | Input & CHILDES | Snow (1995); MacWhinney (1995) |
| Thus 10/14 | Elicited Production | Thornton (1996) |
| Tues 10/19 | NO CLASS; FALL RECESS | |
| Thus 10/21 | Critical Periods | Newport (1990) |
| Tues 10/26 | Bilingualism | de Houwer (1995) |
| Thus 10/28 | Second Language Acquisition | Ritchie & Bhatia (1996) |
| Tues 11/02 | Statistical Learning | Newport & Aslin (2000) |
| Thus 11/04 | Emergence from Inconsistent Input | Singleton & Newport (2004); Helmuth (2001) |
| Tues 11/09 | Individual Differences | Bates et al. (1995) |
| Thus 11/11 | Verbs & Argument Structure | Gropen et al. (1991) |
| Tues 11/16 | More on Syntax | Crain & Thornton (1998) |
| Thus 11/18 | NO CLASS; ROBERT IN MINNEAPOLIS | |
| Tues 11/23 | Pragmatics | Ninio & Snow (1999) |
| Thus 11/25 | NO CLASS; THANKSGIVING RECESS | |
| Tues 11/30 | Sentence Processing | Trueswell et al. (1999) |
| Thus 12/02 | Phonological Impairment | Leonard (1995) |
| Tues 12/07 | Reading/Dyslexia | Snowling (2002) |
Readings in bold are from the Fletcher & MacWhinney text.
References
Bloom, P. (1999). Theories of word learning: Rationalist alternatives to associationism. In W.C. Ritchie & T.K. Bhatia (eds.), Handbook of Child Language Acquisition (pp. 249-28). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Bohannon, J.N., & Stanowicz, L. (1988). The issue of negative evidence: Adult responses to children's language errors. Developmental Psychology, 24, 684-689. [pdf version]
Chomsky, N. (1987). On the nature, use, and acquisition of language.
Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (1998). Wanna Contraction. In Crain, S., & Thornton, R. Investigations in Universal Grammar (pp. 177-186). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gillette, J., Gleitman, H., Gleitman, L., & Lederer, A. (1999). Human simulations of vocabulary learning. Cognition, 73, 35-176. [pdf version]
Gordon, P. (1990). Learnability and feedback. Developmental Psychology, 26, 217-220. [pdf version]
Gropen, J., Pinker, S., Hollander, M., & Goldberg, R. (1991). Syntax and semantics in the acquisition of locative verbs. Journal of Child Language, 18, 115-151.
Jusczyk, P.W. (1999). How infants begin to extract words from speech. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3, 323-328. [pdf version]
Newport, E.L. (1990). Maturational constraints on language learning. Cognitive Science, 14, 11-28. [pdf version]
Newport, E.L., & Aslin, R.N. (2000). Innately constrained learning: Blending old and new approaches to language acquisition. In S.C. Howell, S.A. Fish, and T. Keith-Lucas (eds.), Proceedings of the 24th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 1-21). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. [pdf version]
Newport, E.L., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L.A. (1977). Mother, I'd rather do it myself: Some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style. In Snow & Ferguson (Eds.) Talking to Children: Language input and acquisition (pp. 109-149). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. [pdf version]
Ninio, A., & Snow, C.E. (1999). The development of pragmatics: Learning to use language appropriately. In W.C. Ritchie & T.K. Bhatia (eds.), Handbook of Child Language Acquisition (pp.347-383). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. [pdf version]
Petitto, L.A., & Marentette, P.F. (1991). Babbling in the manual mode: Evidence for the ontogeny of language. Science, 251, 1493-1496. [pdf version]
Ritchie, W.C., & Bhatia, T.K. (1996). Second language acquisition: Introduction, foundations, and overview. In W.C. Ritchie & T.K. Bhatia (Eds.), Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (pp. 1-46). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. [pdf version]
Saffran, J.R., Aslin, R.N., & Newport, E.L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926-1928. [pdf version]
Singleton, J.L., & Newport, E.L. (2004). When learners surpass their models: The acquisition of American Sign Language from inconsistent input. Cognitive Psychology, 49, 370-407. [pdf version]
Snowling, M.J. (2002). Reading development and dyslexia. In U. Goswami (Ed.) Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development (pp. 394-411). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74, 209-253. [pdf version]
Trueswell, J.C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N.M., & Logrip, M.L. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89-134 [pdf version]
Wexler, K. (1990). Innateness and maturation in linguistic development. Developmental Psychobiology, 23, 645-660. [pdf version]