BCSC 152: Syllabus
Fall 2025
Time & Location
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30 - 1:45pm
Room: Wegmans 1400
Personnel
Instructor: Dr. Chung-Lin Martin Yang
Office Hours: 10:30 – 11:30am Mon/Wed (in person and on Zoom)
TAs (in alphabetical order):
Maya Glasman
Juneha Seo
Calli Smith
Doris Zhang
Course Description
The goal of this course is to introduce you the psychological and neuropsychological processes involved in language comprehension, production and acquisition. This course will also provide a solid foundation for those who want to further investigate a wide range of topics in psycholinguistics. Topics to be covered in this course include cognitive mechanisms underlying language processing and acquisition, speech perception, production, word recognition, sentence processing, brain and language, language impairment, and so on.
This course follows the College credit hour policy for four-credit courses. This course meets twice weekly for 3 academic hours per week. The course also includes independent out-of-class assignments (complete the required readings) for at least 1 academic hour per week.
Recommended textbook
Harley, Trevor (2014). The Psychology of Language: from data to theory. Psychology Press (also available as an eBook
Lecture recordings of both lectures in a week (either from the current or previous semester) will be uploaded to Blackboard by the end of every weekend.
Course Requirements
- Participation (9%): Active participation in discussions is expected, some of which may require you to turn in a short summary or post something on Blackboard. The initial class survey is worth 1%. Each graded discussion is worth 2% of the course grade. There will be 4 graded discussions throughout the semester. (These will be only graded as Complete/Incomplete - no partial credits, and late submissions will be graded as “Incomplete/0”.)
If you have any questions about the course materials or lecture, please do feel free to ask for clarification in class, ask us after class, email us, or come to our office hours. We are all friendly and eager to help! - Homework Assignments (20%): Due dates can be found in the course schedule below. Late submission will NOT be accepted unless you have medical or family emergencies (see course policies #2 below).
- Quizzes (20%): Four closed-book quizzes, which include multiple-choice and true/false questions, will be administered on Blackboard in class. Please bring your laptop or tablet (no smartphones!) to take the quizzes only in our regular lecture hall. (Blackboard will record your IP address!) The purpose of these quizzes is to assess how much you understand the course topics and readings.
- Midterm (25.5%) and final (25.5%): A closed-book paper midterm and a final exam will be administered in class. The dates can be found in the class schedule below. Both exams will include multiple-choice and true/false questions. The final exam is NOT cumulative. Study guides will be posted on Blackboard.
Grading
The final grades (rounded up to the nearest integer) will be based upon the
following scale:
(Note that the total points shown on Blackboard are not accurate, as that’s not
weighted by each grading category.)
- A 93 -100
- A- 90 - 92
- B+ 87 - 89
- B 84 – 86
- B- 80 - 83
- C+ 77 – 79
- C 73 – 76
- C- 70 – 72
- D+ 67 – 69
- D 63 – 66
- D- 60 – 62
- E below 60