Psycholinguistics: Psy/Ling 301 and Ling 501

Course Description

Each day, we use language in many ways. We comprehend and produce speech, we write and read text, and we learn new words as well as learn new languages. This course will address a variety questions that address aspects of the psychology of language. These questions include: How do we produce and recognize speech? How do we perceive words and letters? How do we learn and recall information from texts? How can we improve texts to make them easier to read? How do children learn languages? How does the brain function to process language?

Instructor: Peter W. Foltz

Office: Science Hall 323

Phone: 646-1980

email: pfoltz@crl.nmsu.edu

Office hours: Tuesday, Thursday 10:30-11:30, or by appointment

Textbook

coverCarroll , D. W. (2004). The Psychology of Language, Belmont, CA, Wadsworth/Thompson Learning. The book is available in the campus book store. It is also available from Amazon.com.

The Grades

The Grades will be posted here throughout the course.

FINAL Grades for the class

Grades for Exam 2

Grades for Exam 1

If you have questions about the grades and/or want to see your exam, please contact Sara or Dr. Foltz

Special Notices:

Reminder: No class on Tuesday May 4th and the last exam is on May 6th. Graduate students, your papers are due on the 11th. We will be meeting on the 11th (during the scheduled final exam time) for the graduate students to make their presentations.

The Schedule and Policies for the courses:

[button] Class Schedule

[button] Class Policies

Course notes and overheads

I am making available copies of many of the overheads from class. Since there is a fair number of text examples on my overheads, I am now making them available before the lectures, so that you don't have to spend all your time writing down the examples

Exam 1
Exam 2 Exam 3

Paper Assignments

Due April 15th Click here for instructions for your Review paper

To get the paper, do the following:

go to: liberes.nmsu.edu and click: "look up reserves.."
select/click: Foltz, Peter/go
click: link to course web page
enter password: 301
click: "accept"
The list will appear with links to full text articles.

Due March 2nd Click here for the assignment

Due February 17th

For your first writing assignment, you will write a short essay (under 250 words) on "Describe McClelland and Rumelhart's Interactive Activation Model. How does it account for the Word Superiority Effect?"
To help you, you will use an essay grader/critiquer to give you an idea of the quality of your essay and point out problems with it. To go to the essay grader/critiquer, click here.
You should try to do at least three revisions on your essay. You can then either receive the maximum grade the essay grader gives you, or if you are unhappy with that grade, you can submit your essay to the professor, who will grade it by hand. (Note: there is no guarantee that you will get a higher grade from the professor than from the computer!)
You must complete this assignment by Feb 17th at 5pm (but I highly recommend getting it done before the exam on the 17th!).

To help get familiar with how McClelland and Rumelhart's model works, I recommend going to the following demo: Pandemonium Demo. It will allow you to test out a running version of the Pandemonium model.

Some other useful resources:

[button] NMSU Psychology Department Home page

[button] WWW resources in psychology

[button] Cafe Ole (NMSU Library online catalog and indexes)

[button]The Psychology of language home page

You may contact the professor via email by clicking here: pfoltz@crl.nmsu.edu

Click here for Dr. Foltz's web page.