Over the first few years of life, a child masters most of her native language—both its basic vocabulary and its grammatical rules—with ease and without formal instruction. (Photo courtesy of Roland Li on Flickr. License: CC BY-NC-SA.)
Instructor(s)
Prof. Athulya Aravind
MIT Course Number
24.949
As Taught In
Fall 2020
Level
Graduate
Course Description
Course Features
Course Description
This course focuses on the process by which native speakers of a language acquire the ability to speak and understand that language. It covers some of the major results in the study of first-language acquisition, concentrating on morpho-syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The findings primarily come from English, but cross-linguistic differences in the phenomena of interest and corresponding differences in acquisition patterns are considered where appropriate. Of interest throughout is how these developmental data inform linguistic theory and/or learnability theory.
