Language Acquisition and Language Impairment - 1st semester

Code

722131101

Academic unit

Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas

Department

Linguística

Credits

10

Teacher in charge

Maria Sousa Lobo Gonçalves

Weekly hours

3 letivas + 1 tutorial

Teaching language

Portuguese

Objectives

By the end of the curricular unit, students shall:
1. Demonstrate knowledge of theoretical models about language development.
2. Identify stages of language development.
3. Identify properties of phonological, syntactic and semantic-pragmatic development.
4. Master some methods for assessing and analyzing children´s productions.
5. Identify language developmental impairments and linguistic markers of language impairment.

Prerequisites

Subject matter

1. Models of language development: the innatist approach.
2. Methods for assessing data in acquisition.
3. Phonological development: segmental and prosodic levels.
4. Syntactic developement: syntactic structure and syntactic dependencies.
5. Semantic and pragmatic development: information structure and co-reference.
6. Typology of language impairment; the case of SLI.
7. Crosspopulation comparisons between typically developing children and language impaired populations as window into the analysis of developmental patterns.

Bibliography

Crain, S., and R. Thornton (1998) Investigations in Universal Grammar: A Guide to Experiments in the Acquisition of Syntax and Semantics. The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.
Guasti, Maria Teresa (2002) Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Leonard, L.B. (1998) Children with specific language impairment. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press
Lust, Barbara and Claire Foley (2004) First Language Acquisition. The essential
readings. Oxford, Blackwell

Teaching method

Lectures and project presentation by students:

Evaluation method

Evaluation - Portfolium including
a) Synthesis of each session (30%)
b) Two reading reports (20%)
c) Collection of relevant bibliography (10%)
d) Project of experimental design fo the study of the acquisition of a specific construction (40%)

Courses

• Teaching Portuguese in the 3rd Cycle of Basic Education and in Secondary Education and Latin in Secondary Education
• Language Sciences - Language Development and Language Impairment
• Teaching Portuguese in the 3rd Cycle of Basic Education and in Secondary Education in the specialization area of German
• Teaching Portuguese in the 3rd Cycle of Basic Education and in Secondary Education
• Teaching Portuguese in the 3rd Cycle of Basic Education and in Secondary Education in the specialization area of English
• Teaching Portuguese in the 3rd Cycle of Basic Education and in Secondary Education in the specialization area of Spanish