Our planet hosts around 7000 human languages. What do diverse languages across the world have in common and where exactly do they differ? What do these underlying similarities and differences between languages teach us about the human mind? How do linguistic knowledge and behavior differ across speakers of different languages and dialects of the same language, influenced by environmental and social variables such as class, ethnicity, and social identity? These big-picture questions will guide this course. One school of thought argues that all human beings are genetically born with the ability to learn and use complex patterns in language, and thus languages share many universal properties. Another school of thought believes in the concept of “embodied cognition,” or the idea that human language cannot express things that the human mind cannot experience. In this course, we directly study both schools of thought and various topics that highlight the vital mind and language connection. Topics of study will include: - What role do language and cognition play in the development of thoughts? - What are speech and language disorders in the brain? - Why are color naming systems so diverse across languages? - What are dialect continuums and isoglosses and how do they represent language variation across communities? - What role does human memory play in efficiently computing the different orders of words and sentences in languages? - Why are children so good at learning so many complexities of language, while adults are much slower? - What aspects of the mind and language connection are being modeled in Artificial Intelligence? - How are researchers using linguistics methodology to study other systems like music, dance, primate communication? - How can linguistics and cognitive science be used to fight real world problems, such as misinformation? These and other topics will lead us into many modern-day innovations. One example of that is ChatGPT, which was trained on 911 billion words, the equivalent of about 1000 years of non-stop reading. Thus, ChatGPT, the best computer model, required 1000 years worth of training to learn how to have human-like speech, while actual humans can do it in a few short years! Innovations like these and many others show us that the relationship between human cognition and human languages is directly at the forefront of science today, and this relationship is our topic of study in this course.
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