COGS 330 Linguistics for Cognitive Science

Language and cognition are intimately related. For this reason Linguistics has had an extremely strong influence on Cognitive Science. This course studies language and linguistics in the context of Cognitive Science. We will address such questions as how are language and thought related? How is language represented in the brain? How do we process language? To what extent is the human capacity for language innate? Is there a language of thought? What are the best ways to model language acquisition and language processing? We will cover some topics in traditional linguistics and we will look at current research on connectionist and traditional artificial intelligence approaches to modeling language. Reading will include work by Chomsky Pinker McClelland Rumelhart Fodor and Elman.