V61.0028 / V89.0027 Language and Mind
Prof. Mark Baltin & Prof. Lisa Davidson
Spring 2005
This course deals with what our knowledge of language can tell us about the nature of the mind, and vice versa. It is offered jointly by Psychology and Linguistics, presenting methodology and results from both fields. It is well known that language is a social phenomenon; this course will focus on some aspects of language that make its study more like a natural science. We discuss the structure of sentences (syntax), words (morphology), and sound shape (phonetics, phonology), and ask how these are acquired, mentally represented, and processed by humans. We will also discuss work on animal communication and animal cognition, in order to sharpen our understanding of the relationship between thought and language.
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