Speech: its linguistic transcription, its quantitative physical description, and its relationship to the categories and dimensions of language structure and use. The physical basis of speech: acoustics, vocal tract anatomy and physiology, hearing and speech perception, articulation and motor control. Phonetic variation and change. Prosody: stress, intonation, phrasing speech rate. Phonetic instrumentation, the design and interpretation of phonetic experiments, and the use of phonetic evidence in linguistic research, with emphasis on computer techniques. Introduction to speech signal processing. Speech technology: introduction to speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech coding. This course will emphasize the phonetics of natural speech, and its connections to issues in other areas of linguistics and cognitive science.

Synchronic and diachronic systems. Analogic processes. Semantic change. Effects of contact. Internal reconstruction. Comparative method and reconstruction.

This tutorial allows students to deal in a concentrated manner with selected major topics in linguistics by means of extensive readings and research. Two topics are studied during the semester, exposing students to a range of sophisticated linguistic questions.

This course provides an introduction to formal semantics for natural language. The main aim is to develop a semantic system that provides a compositional interpretation of natural language sentences. We discuss various of the aspects central to meaning composition, including function application, modification, quantification, and binding, as well as issues in the syntax-semantics interface. The basic formal tools relevant for semantic analysis, including set theory, propositional logic, and predicate logic are also introduced.

This course is an upper level undergraduate/graduate seminar in neurolinguistics. We will explore language in the brain through readings and discussions.

An introduction to language acquisition in children and the development of related cognitive and perceptual systems. Topics include the nature of speech perception and the specialization to the native language; the structure and acquisition of words; children's phonology; the development of grammar; bilingualism and second language acquisition; language learning impairments; the biological basis of language acquisition; the role in language learning in language change. Intended for any undergraduate interested in the psychology and development of language.

This course is an introduction to current syntactic theory, covering the principles that govern phrase structure (the composition of phrases and sentences), movement (dependencies between syntactic constituents), and binding (the interpretation of different types of noun phrases). Although much of the evidence discussed in the class will come from English, evidence from other languages will also play an important role, in keeping with the comparative and universalist perspective of modern syntactic theory.

This course focuses on experimental investigations of speech sounds. General contents include: the fundamentals of speech production and perception; speech analysis tools and techniques; and topics in phonetic studies. The course consists of integrated lectures and laboratory sessions in which students learn computer techniques for analyzing digital recordings.

This is a course about how language and communication can be thought of as games. When people use language to communicate, they are following rules to perform actions that have an effect on the world, including other people. These actions might achieve goals, and they might prompt further actions, and so on. Perhaps more interestingly, these communicative actions can, over time, lead to changes in the environment and even the rules of the game itself. In other words, the playing field changes dynamically as a result of the actions performed on it.
This way of looking at language is not new, and this is also a course about how thinking about language this way can inspire (and has inspired) formal models and laboratory experiments that help us to understand how humans use language and how it evolves. In doing so we will also situate this approach to studying language in a broader context of studying the cultural evolution of complex behavioral systems more generally.

This is a course on how language relates to other cognitive systems. We will discuss the question of whether and how the language one speaks affects the way one thinks, the relation between words and concepts, the link between language acquisition and conceptual development in children, and the potential role of language in shaping uniquely human concepts. The course incorporates cross-linguistic, cross-cultural and developmental perspectives and combines readings from linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and other fields within cognitive science.