Meeting times: Monday 4-7pm room CAS 326.

Professor. Paul Hagstrom, 718 Commonwealth Ave. (Dept. of Modern Foreign Languages & Literatures), Office 401D. Email: hagstrom@bu.edu (likely to get a quick response). Phone: 617-353-6220 (x3-6220). Office hours: Monday, Tuesday 2-3pm, Thursday 12-1pm.

Prerequisites. CAS LX 522 ("Syntax I"), or equivalent.

Course goals. After a general introduction to the study of language acquisition within the principles and parameters framework of generative grammar (defining the central concepts and laying out some of the theoretical issues), we will cover a number of topics of current relevance to the field, including: the status of functional categories, verb movement and finiteness, null subjects, binding theory, and wh-questions. In the first part of the course, we will concentrate on first language acquisition, then turning to second language acquisition in the second part of the course. By the end of this course, you should be familiar with the major concepts in the study language acquisition from a theoretical perspective.

Course Requirements. Readings. Readings from the textbook and from papers from the literature will be assigned each week. Homework. There will be homework assignments (probably 8) pertaining to the readings, each due a week after assigned. CHILDES lab. A relatively small lab exercise will be assigned, analyzing some child data from the CHILDES database. This will be due October 14. Experiment design. Around midterm, a description of an experiment you have designed to test for the acquisition of some aspect of language. This will be due on October 27. Final project. You will conduct and write up a pilot experiment testing for the acquisition of some linguistic property; the write-up should be 10-12 pages long, and the experiment may (or may not) be based on the experiment designed at midterm. The experiment may involve collecting data from subjects or analyzing data from existing corpus. The proposal will be due two weeks after your experimental design is due, on November 10, and the final project paper will be due on the last day of classes (December 11). Further details on the experimental design and the final project will be given out in class.

Email. Whenever feasible, homework (or project proposals, or final papers) can be emailed to me at hagstrom@bu.edu. Text-only is preferred, but you may also send PDF, RTF, or Microsoft Word files. Postscript and Word Perfect files are less welcome, and don't even bother sending TeX or LaTeX files. If you don't know what I'm talking about, just hand in a paper copy. Wherever email won't work for any reason (e.g., for tree diagrams), homework can be turned in at the beginning of class. Be aware that if you use any special fonts, I may not be able to read your homework--be sure you know how to "include" nonstandard fonts (or send it to me early, so I can let you know if I was unable to read it).

Late assignments. Late assignments will be accepted only by prior arrangement with me.

CAS Student Academic Conduct Code. It is essential that you read and adhere to the CAS Student Academic Conduct Code. In particular, several types of plagiarism (any attempt to represent the work of another as your own) are defined by this academic conduct code. A copy is available in CAS 105.

Textbooks. Lydia White (2003) Universal grammar and second language acquisition (publisher's page, Amazon); Maria Teresa Guasti (2002) Language Acquisition (publisher's page, Amazon). Both books are required, but Guasti's book is a bit costly. Given that, two words of advice: a) consider buying it directly from MIT Press or at least compare prices with other retailers, b) consider visitng the MIT Press Bookstore to check to see if there's a discount copy in the "Hurt Books" section, as sometimes there are. Also, note that White's book is new this year. She had published a book in 1989 by the same title, but it is the 2003 (red) book you want, not the 1989 (grey & white) book.

Readings. This course will sometimes rely on outside readings from the linguistics literature (journal articles, manuscripts, and excerpts from books). These readings will be available in the hallway outside my office suite, in a folder labeled LX700. You may take the readings out for no more than an hour to make a personal photocopy, and then they should be returned to the folder so that others may photocopy them.