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BCS 562 Computational Accounts of Language Production Graduate seminar on computational models of language production (and a little bit on comprehension and learning).

BCS 152 Language & Psycholinguistics - An introduction to the field of psycholinguistics. How is language represented in our mind/brain, how do we process (produce and comprehend) it so efficiently and really fast despite the fact that it's an amazingly complex task (note that we have so far not managed to build computers that resemble anything close to human language abilities)? How is it that babies acquire language without being explicitly taught? What are the biological foundations of language (the brain structures involved in the processing and acquisition of language)?

Note that I will be on junior leave next Fall, so that BCS 152 will be taught by someone else.

LSA 125: Psycholinguistics and syntactic corpora - An introduction to corpus-based work on psycholinguistics.

TAs: Judith Degen, Alex Fine, Peter Graff.

BCS 563 Topics in Language Production & Comprehension (Co-taught with Mike Tanenhaus): Graduate seminar on language production and comprehension. At least for the production part, we may take a cross-linguistic angle, focusing on how data from other languages has informed theories of sentence production. Other topics may be the relation between early probabilistic accounts that focus on the implementational level (connectionist networks, competition models) and recent computational models (surprisal-based parsing, constant entropy rate in production).

BCS 152 Language & Psycholinguistics - An introduction to the field of psycholinguistics. How is language represented in our mind/brain, how do we process (produce and comprehend) it so efficiently and really fast despite the fact that it's an amazingly complex task (note that we have so far not managed to build computers that resemble anything close to human language abilities)? How is it that babies acquire language without being explicitly taught? What are the biological foundations of language (the brain structures involved in the processing and acquisition of language)?

This class has been updated in several ways. There is now more discussion of language production (both at the word level and the sentence level), and there is generally more of a focus on language processing (rather than linguistic representations, although the two topics are, of course, related). We are also trying to reduce overlap with other classes on language and the brain and language acquisition. Finally, the requirements have changed somewhat: this semester we are piloting a short paper requirement. Students can select from different research topics and have to write a short review paper about two short articles.

BCS 152 Language & Psycholinguistics - An introduction to the field of psycholinguistics. How is language represented in our mind/brain, how do we process (produce and comprehend) it so efficiently and really fast despite the fact that it's an amazingly complex task (note that we have so far not managed to build computers that resemble anything close to human language abilities)? How is it that babies acquire language without being explicitly taught? What are the biological foundations of language (the brain structures involved in the processing and acquisition of language)?

Laboratory Syntax (together with Ivan A. Sag) - We cover alternative accounts of variation in acceptability judgments. The empirical focus is on island violations, especially in wh-extraction. The class includes applied tutorials on web-based experimentation and eliciation of acceptability judgments, design issues, analysis of survey data, and maybe reading time experimentation.

Focus and prosodic prominence (together with Sasha Calhoun; invited speaker: Bob Ladd), an introduction to prominence above the word level and specifically its relation to so called focus phenomena. The class was directed at an audience with no or little background in phonology/prosody/semantics. Check out the class materials with summaries of papers, as well as our handouts. For some of the materials you will need a password. If you're interested pls contact me.

Corpus TA for the Linguistics Department. In addition to general maintenance of corpora and software, as well as user support, the corpus TA is meant to provide support to corpus oriented courses (such as: the "Methods class", "Real English", etc.).

Symbolic Systems 100 - Introduction to Cognitive Science (Profs: Tom Wasow, David Beaver, James Greeno; Other TAs: Damon Horrowitz, Sheba Najmi)

Linguistics 120 - Introduction to Syntax (Profs: Tom Wasow, Emily Bender; Other TAs: Judith Tonhauser, Ivan Garcia)