- Students can explain and compare the different theories of and methods used in early language perception and production research and know the milestones in early language perception and production
- Student are able to critically discussand evaluatescientific papers
- Students can designexperiments to test questions regarding early language perception and production and are able to writea research report or proposal
- Students can collaborate in a research team
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In this course you learn to investigate how infants learn to understand and produce their mother tongue, focusing on the acquisition of the sound system (including lexicon). During the first year of life infants develop from being so-called 'universal' listeners into 'language-specific' listeners as they become increasingly sensitive to language-specific features of the sound system of their native language. There is a lively academic debate about how they do this, how children represent language in their brains, and which factors influence acquisition. In this course we discuss the main views on the nature of the language acquisition process form both the perspective of infant speech perception and of early child language production.
This course contains two blocks. In the first block we focus on reviewing the literature, discussing the current debates in the field, the methods used, and working on a research proposal, which we will further develop during the second block. If possible, we develop, conduct, analyse and report a production (and/or perception) experiment.
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An introduction into child language acquisition is required. Suggested reading: Understanding Child Language Acquisition by Caroline Rowland.
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