Language Acquisition

A little girl and a bear with text, 'This is Mama Bear; this is Goldilocks. Is Mama Bear touching her?'

A sample stimulus item from an experiment testing children's knowledge of pronoun reference. (Drawing by Prof. Ken Wexler.)

Instructor(s)

MIT Course Number

9.57J / 24.904J

As Taught In

Fall 2001

Level

Undergraduate

Cite This Course

Course Description

Course Features

Course Highlights

What is it that someone knows, when we say that he or she knows a language? This is the question addressed by linguists and psycholinguists exploring the structure of a language.

Course Description

Covers the major results in the study of first language acquisition concentrating on the development of linguistic structure, including sentence structure and morphology. Universal aspects of development are discussed, as well as a variety of cross-linguistic phenomena. Theories of language learning are considered, including parameter-setting and maturation.

Related Content

Ken Wexler. 9.57J Language Acquisition. Fall 2001. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


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