The following materials were prepared for an 300-level online accelerated course in Language Development taught at the University of Arizona in the Fall of 2019.
Note: This course is loosely structured around two textbooks, Gerkin (2009) and Hoff (1997), both titled Language Development. Some of the lessons posted below may, therefore, follow one of these two textbooks in structure and may share some of the same examples.
Lesson Videos:
External Content
External Content 1: Clip from the PBS Documentary Evolution, episode 4, The Mind's Big Bang about the birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language
External Content 2: Nicaraguan Sign Language - Language Stories episode 11 (by Lindsay Williams)
External Content 3: I, Claudia: In the Deaf Community of Nicaragua (produced by John Michalczyk, 2005)
Readings:
Fromkin et al. (2003): Chapter 1 - What is Language?
Gerken (2009): Chapter 1 - Introduction
Discussion Prompt: Unit 1
Practice Problems: Unit 1
Lesson Videos:
Lesson 6: Hearing language before you're born? (for slides click here)
Lesson 7: Contingent Sucking Rate Experimental Paradigm (for slides click here)
Lesson 8: High Amplitude Sucking Experimental Paradigm (for slides click here)
Lesson 9: Categorical Speech Perception in Infants (for slides click here)
Lesson 10: Deciding Which Distinctions Matter
Linguistics Tutorial Videos:
Tutorial 1: What's there to learn about intonation?
Tutorial 2: Phonetic Variables 1: Voice Onset Time
Tutorial 3: Phonetic Variables 2: Formant Frequencies
Tutorial 4: (optional) Building a Set of Minimal Pairs
External Content:
External Content 4: Sucking Rate Demonstration, 'Babies Learn Language in the Womb' (posted by I-Labs UW)
External Content 5: Visual Habituation Demonstration from 'What Babies can Do: An Activity-Based Guide to Infant Development '(produced/directed by: Stevens & Vishton, 2009)
External Content 6: Conditioned Head Turn Demonstration from the Discovery Channel 'The Baby Human' (Spidell et al. 2003)
External Content 7: Three Procedures for Investigating Infant Speech (produced by Jusczyk's Lab in 1999)
External Content 8: Bilingual and monolingual baby brains differ in response to language (posted by I-Labs UW)
External Content 9: Intro to Phonology: Phonemes and Allophones (by NativLang)
External Content 10: (optional) How to Test Language in Babies (by The Ling Space)
External Content 11: (optional) The Conditioned Head Turn Task (produced by the Infant Studies Centre at UBC)
Readings:
Gerken (2009): Chapter 3 - Phonological Perception
Language Files 2.5 (12th Ed.) - Suprasegmental Features
Language Files 2.6 (12th Ed.) - Acoustic Phonetics
Bergelson & Swingley (2013) - The acquisition of abstract words by young infants (Intro and Methods)
Werker & Tees (1984) - Cross-Language Speech Perception... (for homework assignment)
(optional) Language Files 3.2 (12th Ed.) - Phonemes and Allophones
(optional) DeCasper & Fifer (1980) - Of Human Bonding
(optional) Volumanos & Werker (2007) - Listening to Language at Birth
Other Resources:
Discussion Prompt: Unit 2
Practice Problems: Unit 2
Video Lessons:
Lesson 11: A Tour of the Vocal Tract (for slides click here)
Lesson 12: The Ways to Make the Sounds of Speech (for slides click here)
Lesson 13: What is the IPA? (for slides click here)
Lesson 14: The IPA Vowels (for slides click here)
Lesson 15: The IPA Consonants (for slides click here)
Lesson 16: Vocal Tract Development (for slides click here)
Lesson 17: Babbling (for slides click here)
Lesson 18: How do early words differ from adult pronunciations? (for slides click here)
Lesson 19: Why do kids pronounce things wrong? (for slides click here)
Linguistics Video Tutorials
Tutorial 5: How to check IPA transcriptions (for slides click here)
External Content:
External Content 12: (optional) IPA & Phonetics: Vowels (by NativLang)
Readings:
Language Files 2.1-2.3 (12th ed.)
Gerken (2009): Chapter 4 - Phonological Production
Krcmar & Lin (2007): Can toddlers learn vocabulary from television (for homework assignment)
(optional) Hoff (1997): Chapter 4 - Phonological Development: Learning the Sounds of Language
Discussion Prompt: Unit 3
Practice Problems: Unit 3
Video Lessons:
Lesson 20: Mixing up meanings in early words (for slides click here)
Lesson 21: Building a Vocabulary: The Numbers (for slides click here)
Lesson 22: Children's Strategies for Word-Learning (for slides click here)
Lesson 23: Early Production of Sentences (for slides click here)
Readings:
Hoff (1997): Chapter 5 - Lexical Development: Learning Words
Hoff (1997): Chapter 6 (pg. 169-179) - The Development of Syntax and Morphology...
Fromkin et al. (2003): pg. 363-367 - The Acquisition of Syntax
Krcmar & Lin (2007): Can toddlers learn vocabulary from television (for homework assignment)
(optional) Language Files 5.1-5.4 (12th edition)
Discussion Prompt: Unit 4
Practice Problems: Unit 4
Video Lessons:
Lesson 25: Syntactic Categories (for slides click here)
Lesson 26: Basic Morphology (for slides click here)
Lesson 27: Children's Understanding of Morphology (for slides click here)
Lesson 28: Learning to Negate Sentences in English (for slides click here)
Lesson 29: Learning to Ask Questions (for slides click here)
Readings:
Hoff (1997): Chapter 6 part 2 (pg. 178-203)
Language Files 5.3 & 5.4
Genesee, Nicoladis, and Paradis (1995) - Language Differentiation in early bilingual development
Discussion Prompt: Unit 5
Practice Problems: Unit 5
Video Lessons:
Lesson 30: Encouraging Active Bilingualism (for slides click here)
Lesson 31: Bilingual Language Development (for slides click here)
External Content:
External Content 13: Baby Reading and Manual Babbling: The Bear Hug (posted by Handspeak: Sign Language Online)
External Content 15: Why is Language so Hard for Autistic Children? (a TedMed talk by Joy Hirsch)
Readings:
Genesee & Nicoladis (2007): Bilingual First Language Acquisition
Meier (2016): Sign Language Acquisition
Language Files 1.5 (12th ed.): Language Modality
Hoff (1997): Chapter 11 (pg. 329-339)
Genesee, Nicoladis, and Paradis (1995) - Language Differentiation in early bilingual development (for homework)
Discussion Prompt: Unit 6
Practice Problems: Unit 6
Video Lessons:
Lesson 32: Infant-Directed Speech (for slides click here)
Lesson 33: The "30-million Word Gap" (for slides click here)
Lesson 34: Drawing it together (for slides click here)
External Content
External Content 16: Vocal Fries: Mind the Gap (July 2, 2018)
Readings:
Nation (date?): A Brief Critique of Hart and Risley (click here)
Gerken (2009): pg. 206-213 (The Critical Period)
Homework Paper-Summary Options:
Allen & Crago (1996) - Early passive acquisition in Inuktitut
Arias-Trejo et al. (2014) - Early comprehension of the Spanish plural
Caselli et al. (1999) - A comparison of the transition from first words to grammar in English and Italian
Polka & Werker (1994) - Developmental Changes in Perception in Nonnative Vowel Contrasts
Yeung & Werker (2013) - Lip movements affect infants' audiovisual speech perception
Discussion Prompt: Unit 7
Practice Problems: Unit 7
In addition to the resources above, I have four homework assignments (with answer sheets) and a take-home final exam. I've chosen not to post direct links to these on this page, but if you are curious about any of these assignments, shoot me an email and I can send you a link!
Licensing Statement: All instructional resources on this site are being released under a Creative Commons 2.0 BY-NC license, so you should feel free to use them or remix them, with attribution, if you're preparing your own class!