Seminar On Language In Perception Thought

This course provides graduate students with an advanced introduction to empirical findings, methods, and theoretical perspectives from the field of psycholinguistics, as they pertain to the relationship between language, perception and thought. In the first half of the semester, the Whorfian Hypothesis will be introduced. Topics will include grammatical gender, categorical perception, spatial and numerical cognition. Perspectives from the domain of cross-modal perception and synaesthesia will be introduced to provide neurological bases for language-perception interactions. In the second half of the course, students will conduct a mini-study on interactions between language and vision, language and audition, or language and number, the results of which they will present at the end of the semester. An in-depth focus on the development of speech perception will be used as a test case for discussions about the direction of influence between language and cognition/perception. Interactions between mind and language in extreme scenarios will also be addressed.