pleh@edpsy.u-szeged.hu

• grammar based, modular versus interactionist models of understanding
• arguments for a processing typology of languages
• the issue of rules and habits in language processing
• cognition, brain and grammar in spatial language
• the modularity issue in the light of developmental pathology

• Three rival approaches to crosslinguistic differences:
• parameter setting, canonic forms, competition.
• Motivations for the different models.
• An example: age differences between languages in Animacy.
• Order constraints in ‘configurational’ and free word order languages.
• The use of memory according to language structure: adaptive models.
• Processing in L2 and in bilinguals.

Hunt, E.—Agnoti, F. (1991): The Whorfian hypothesis: A cognitive psychology perspective, Psychological Review 98, 377—389. o.

MacWhinney, B.—Bates, E. (1989, eds.): The Crosslinguistic Study of Sentence Processing, Cambridge University Press

György Gergely (1991): Free word order and discourse interpretation. Budapest: Akadémiai

• Three types of models for morphology processing:
• analytic, holistic, mixed.
• Segmentation, access, compiling and meaning combination in processing multimorphemic words.
• Inflectional and agglutinative languages. Strategy differences.
• Ambiguity processing in an agglutinative language: modular or interactive?

Feldman L. B. (ed.1995): Mophological aspects of language processing. Erlbaum: Hillsdale NJ

Lukatela G. Carello C. Savic M. Urtosevic Z and Turvey M.T. (1998): When nonwords activate semantics better than words. Cognition 68 B31-B40.

MacWhinney, B. (1976): Hungarian research on the acquisition of morphology and syntax. J. Child Lang., 3, 397-410

Marslen-Wilson W. D. Tyler L. K. Waksler R. and Older L. (1994): Morphology and meaning in the English mental lexicon. Psychological Review 101 3-33.

• Three models for the treatment of rules:
• rules all over the place, only connections, rules and exceptions.
• Early data on rules and morphology (Bellugi, Slobin. MacWhinney)
• The importance of the Rumelhart-McClelland model and its follow-up.
• Rule unfolding and morphology processing in Hungarian.
• Brain theories and dual systems. Damage to the rule system.

MacWhinney, B. (1994): The dinosaurs and the ring.

Pinker, S. and Prince, A. (1994): Regular and irregular morphology and the psychological status of rules of grammar.

Both In: Lima, S.D., Corrigan, R.L. and Iverson, G.K. (eds.): The reality of linguistic rules. Amsterdam: Benjamins

Marslen-Wilson W. D. and Tyler L. K. (1997): Dissociating types of mental computation. Nature 387 592-594

Ullmann, T., Ciorkin, S, Copolla, M., Hickok, G., Growdon, J, Koroshetz and Pinker, S (1997): A neural dissociation within language … Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 266-276

• Language and space as an issue of cognitive and linguistic determinism.
• The language of space and the organization of the brain: the what and where system mapped into Nouns and prepositions (Landau and Jackendoff). Form dependent and relation dependent systems.
• Acquisition studies: early and later spatial expressions across languages.
• The primacy of goals and containers: language and intentional action.
• The openness of spatial language: acquisition of artificial systems.
• Universal and relative in coding space: frames of reference.

 Bowerman, M. (1994): From universal to language-specific in early grammatical development, Phil. Transaction of the Royal Society, London, B 346, 37—45

Landau, B. and Jackendoff, R. (1993): "What" and "where" in spatial language and spatial cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16, 217-265,

 Optional Readings

Levinson, S. C. (1996): Frames of reference and Molyneux's question: Crosslinguistic evidence. In: Bloom, P., Peterson, M. A., Nadel, R., Garrett, M. F. (szerk.): Language and Space. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press

Kir€ly I., Racsm€ny, M., and Pl?h , Cs. (2001) The system of spatial expressions in the Hungarian language. Pragmatoc of 200, In press, International Pragmatics Conference, Budapest, 9-14 July 2000.

• The issue of double dissociation in language processing and modularity.
• The doctrine of Specific Language Impairment: different models, data and explanations: grammar module, sequencing of disorder, memory integration.
• Williams syndrome as an ‘intact grammar module case’. Specificity of WSC language and the unfolding of atypical profiles.
• Modularity and processing of pragmatic aspects of language: autism, prefrontal damage, right hemisphere and language.

_gnes Lukacs, Mihaly Racsmany and Csaba Plah:Vocabulary and morphological patterns in Hungarian children with Williams syndrome: a preliminary report Acta Linguistica Hungarica, In press

 Optional Readings

Clahsen, H. & Almazan, M. (1998) Syntax and morphology in Williams syndrome. Cognition,68(3),167–98.

Pléh Cs. (2001) Modularity and pragmatics: Some simple and some complicated ways. Journal of Pragmatics, in press

In the small group meetings students will participate in more elaborate discussions on debated issues, papers and methods used in different areas.

• modular and interactive architectures of language processing
• cross-linguistic comparisons in processing morphology
• cognitive constraints in spatial language
• what is special about the language of Williams syndrome children
• the neuroscience of pragmatic processing.

I propose that students who desire credit write a 10 page paper describing selected topics of their own interest. Here are some examples:

• connectionist approaches to morphology
• learning and innatist accounts of language pathology
• spatial language (examples from a given language)
• why are exceptions so important to psycholinguistics?
• language processing and the brain