New Bulgarian University > Center for Cognitive Science > Preparatory Program > Course Description

COG415 Psycholinguistics
  1. Aims:


  2. Objectives:
    On completion of the course students should be able to:


  3. Learning strategies:


  4. Overall duration and format:
    A one semester (15 weeks) course with two hours of lectures and seminars.

  5. Credit hours: 2.

  6. Lecturer: Prof. Encho Gerganov and Assist. Prof. Elena Andonova.

  7. Literature:
    Carroll, D. W. (1994),

    Clark, H. H. and Clark, E. V. (1977),

    Taylor, I. (1976),

    Levelt (1992),

    Altman (1991),


  8. Course outline:
    Psycholinguistics is one of the youngest interdisciplinary sciences about language. For a long time Linguistics has been the only scientific discipline which has made description , analyses and explanation of language structures and mechanisms. Many facets of language as a tool of Human communication have been successfully described in Linguistics. However, language is a psychological phenomenon by nature. It is impossible to acquire deep knowledge about it without using psychological approaches.

    Psycholinguistics is the psychological study of language. There are four clusters of issues in the course.

    The first cluster includes general issues of scientific inquiry of language. Some basic concepts of Linguistics like Grammar and its phonological, syntactic and semantic components are introduced. Essential topics of Transformational Grammar and Case Grammar are presented, as well. Different stages of Human information processing are considered in order to depict psychological mechanisms underlying language usage. Biological foundations of language are given, too.

    The second cluster consists of basic knowledge about language comprehension, whose levels of cognitive representation are discussed in detail. Separate lectures are devoted to the cognitive processes of speech perception, the issues in the representation of meaning, the structure of the internal lexicon and the lexical access in Memory. Recent research on sentence and discourse comprehension are presented in this cluster.

    The third cluster includes some aspects of language production and the fourth one considers selected problems of language development. Language production and language development are intrinsically difficult subjects to study. As a consequence, there is a lack of knowledge about these processes. So each of these topics is presented by only one lecture.

  9. Main Topics:

    Topic 1: The scope of Psycholinguistics. Scientific research of language in different disciplines.
    Required reading:


    Topic 2: Main linguistic topics related to the cognitive nature of language.
    Required readings:


    Topic 3: Human information processing and language usage.
    Required readings:


    Topic 4: Biological foundation of language.
    Required readings:


    Topic 5: Speech perception. The structure of speech.
    Required readings:


    Topic 6: Cognitive processes in speech perception.
    Required reading:


    Topic 7: Research methods in speech perception.
    Required reading:


    Topic 8: Mental lexicon. Issues in the representation of meaning in memory.
    Required readings:


    Topic 9: Structure of the internal lexicon.
    Required readings:


    Topic 10: Lexical access in memory.
    Required reading:


    Topic 11: Sentence interpretation and comprehension.
    Required readings:


    Topic 12: Representation of discourse in memory.
    Required reading:


    Topic 13: Schemata and discourse processing.
    Required reading:


    Topic 14: Language production.
    Required readings:


    Topic 15: Language development.
    Required reading:


  10. Assessment:


  11. Prerequisites: COG105.

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