Reading Responses
Each student is expected to submit a written response (one page maximum) to each week’s readings, by 6 pm of the Sunday evening before each Tuesday class.
Research Project
A main goal of the course is to acquire the skill of translating a research question into experimentally testable hypotheses for a special population (children).
If you are taking the course for credit, you must develop an acquisition-related research topic of your own interest. It can be on anything that supports a substantive exchange between linguistic theory and language acquisition. By class 6, let me know what your topic is. You are expected to meet with me about the project at least once and give a brief presentation about it in the latter half of the semester. No write-up is required. In your presentation, you will lay out the problem and its significance, identify connections to prior work, describe the research methods and design, and explain how the proposed approach will advance our understanding of the phenomenon in question.
Samples of research topics selected by students in the Fall 2020 iteration of the course:
- How children interpret “at least”
- Acquisition of exceptional scope
- Acquisition of scrambling in Korean
- Comparison of tough-constructions and gapped degree phrases
- Acquisition of suppletive “two” 兩 in Mandarin
- Root infinitives in English
- Acquiring anti-passives
