Linguistics

This course surveys current psycholinguistic research on how humans learn, represent, comprehend, and produce language. Specific topics covered include visual and auditory word recognition, word production, sentence comprehension and production, changes of language ability through out the life span, neural representation of language, computational modeling of language processing, bilingualism, language disorders and the relation between language and the cognitive systems.

The course discusses the problems, methods, and results of sociolinguistics, in particular the social aspects that influence linguistic change. It explores the incidence of social and cultural factors in the acquisition and use of language, as well as on the sociolinguistic status of Indigenous languages and the linguistic planning of the different Latin American countries. 

It is generally assumed that language, culture, and our way of thinking are related. The relation, which is often called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis or linguistic relativity, has been the subject of serious philosophical, anthropological and scientific inquiry. Taking advantage of the extensive bilingualism in Singapore, this course selects a few salient grammatical features and critically examines them within the broader cultural and/or cognitive contexts. Topics discussed include pluralisation, classifier, tense and aspect, kinship, polysemy, metaphor and bilingual acquisition. Issues related to translation are also discussed.

This course examines the most salient aspects of Occitan and observes how the same linguistic diasystem is realized in the form of dialects with marked tonalities and musicality. This approach makes it possible to implement and extend the phonetic skills acquired for French in the first year as well as some syntax points. This course constitutes a practical introduction to Romantic studies, as Occitan is the autochthonous Romance language covering most of Southern France and the vehicle of an abundant literature.

This course provides an introduction to contemporary approaches to the study of the varieties of the English language observed across nations, regions, social groups, and contexts. The two major goals of the course are to illustrate the concepts of sociolinguistics that are essential to studying the expansion and resulting diversity of English and to examine the social, cultural, and linguistic impact of English in countries where English is taught and used as a second or foreign language.

Phonetics deals with the sounds of the spoken languages of the world. This course addresses the following questions: In human speech, how are sounds produced and perceived? How can they best be described and represented? How can one assess them better or differently through using computers? The course also includes practice in the production of a variety of sounds from different types of languages. 

This course covers topics in phonetics, including but not limited to acoustic phonetics, articulatory phonetics and auditory phonetics. The course also introduces and analyzes segments and suprasegments of world languages with respect to theories of phonetics sciences. 

Course Prerequisite: Introduction to Linguistics I and II, or consent of the instructor.