Psychology of Language

Undergraduate course, Psychological Sciences, UConn, 2023

PSYC3500. Description: Language is a human faculty that we take for granted, like breathing. Nobody taught us to breathe, just as no one taught us to listen, understand, and make sense of the jumble of sounds that we’re confronted with from the moment we’re born. Yet, somehow we learn to make sense of the sounds we hear; we hear patterns in those sounds and we associate meanings with those patterns. As adults, we possess knowledge about tens of thousands of words, what they mean, how they’re spelled, how they sound, how to move the muscles in the lips and tongue to pronounce them, how to join them up to form sentences. In this course we discuss ways in which psycholinguists study language in the mind and brain.