Global Arc

This course covers the linguistic, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, and sociolinguistic aspects of bilingualism. We examine language acquisition in monolingual and bilingual children, the notion of "critical age" for language acquisition, definitions and measurements of bilingualism, and the verbal behavior of bilinguals such as code-switching. We consider the effects of bilingualism on other cognitive domains, including memory, and examine neurolinguistic evidence comparing the brains of monolinguals and bilinguals. Societal and governmental attitudes toward bilingualism in countries like India and the U.S. are contrasted.

This course explores intonation (the melodic patterns of sentences), addressing questions like: What does punctuation (e.g., a comma) sound like? How can we measure intonation, acoustically? How is intonation different from "tone" in languages like Mandarin? How do we transcribe intonation and analyze it? Students learn how to use laboratory methods and computer software to study intonation in spoken languages. (We focus on Mainstream American English but study other languages/dialects as well.) We also examine how intonational features relate to other aspects of language, such as sentence structure, linguistic meaning, and social context.

What does it mean to understand an utterance? By producing and hearing utterances, we learn new things about the world and about the interlocutors, and communicate our own beliefs and desires. How does this happen? What types of inferences do we make in the process? This course provides an overview of how linguistics meaning and inferences have been analyzed from various angles. We will investigate key issues concerning 'meaning' in compositional/lexical semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. Topics will comprise types of linguistic inferences, and connections between language and time, causation and identity.

Linguistic analysis of American Sign Language, covering phonology, syntax, and semantics.

Pronunciation of words involves more than simply stringing vowels and consonants together. This course examines how pitch, duration and intensity - the three phonetic correlates of prosodic events - are used in language to structure words. We will learn how speech sounds are organized into rhythmic patterns and how prosodic features interact with the rhythmic structure. We will explore the notions of stress, accent and tone and survey a variety of word prosodic systems from around the world. We will also consider how such systems arise and the historical transformations they may undergo.

This course explores methods for recording and analyzing neural activity from populations of neurons at cellular resolution, and the scientific discoveries that such methods have enabled. Topics include methods for electrical and optical recording of large populations of neurons, as well as their application to studying neural dynamics underlying animal behavior. The course will survey seminal journal articles in the field and will provide students with hands-on practice analyzing real neural population recording datasets.

This course examines behavior, learning, and cognitive capacities with a focus on the cerebellum, a brain structure that is universal to vertebrates. The cerebellum's microcircuit architecture is largely conserved, so that its local information processing can provide a rigorous starting point for analysis. Cerebellar function will be considered in terms of evolution, development, microcircuit physiology, connectomics, long-distance connectivity to the rest of the brain, animal behavior, and human function and dysfunction, including autism. Readings will draw on original literature, and weekly discussions will be led partly by students.

The basal ganglia is an interconnected set of brain regions involved in a wide range of essential functions, including reward-based learning, action selection and motor control. These circuits are also implicated in a wide range of neuropsychiatric diseases, including addiction and Parkinson's. How do these circuits contribute to this array of healthy and diseased functions? In this seminar, we will read and analyze modern systems and circuits neuroscience papers to address these questions.

Plasticity refers to the nervous system's ability to change its structure and function in response to intrinsic or extrinsic influences. Plasticity is necessary for healthy brain development and is an important player in brain damage and disease, as too little or too much can underlie the inability of the brain to effectively repair itself. This course will consider recent research into these topics exploring molecular, cellular and circuit-level mechanisms of synaptic and structural plasticity during development and adulthood, under conditions of health as well as damage and disease.

Computers now exceed humans in many complex, real-world tasks. However, humans remain unique in the range of tasks they can perform, and the ability to generalize their knowledge to new ones. This course will consider the components and characteristics of a computational architecture needed to achieve these capabilities. Topics will span work in cognitive, brain, and computer science. Students will come away with a broad view of how these fields are informing each other, and how together they are beginning to provide an outline of the computational architecture responsible for the (still) uniquely human form of intelligence.