Academic Catalog

ELT621 CHILD LANGUAGE AND CORE COGNITION

Course Code: 8200621
METU Credit (Theoretical-Laboratory hours/week): 3(0-0)
ECTS Credit: 8.0
Department: English Language Teaching
Language of Instruction: English
Level of Study: Graduate
Course Coordinator:
Offered Semester: Fall and Spring Semesters.

Course Content

What is the nature of human conceptual knowledge? How do children gain mental representation of the world? Are there any core concepts functioning as precursors to language acquisition? What might be such candidate core concepts(e.g., objects, agents, causality, goals, events, quantity, numerosity, space, time)? How do children attain this core knowledge? How do these core conceptsinteract with language development? How do we encode conceptual representations in different languages? How do children establish the mapping between the world and their language? What might be the mechanism of conceptual enrichment? What is the function of language in the enrichment of the human conceptual representations? How do children reason about the world? What kind of domain-specific (linguistic) and domain-general abilities guide children in their categorizing, inferencing, and reasoning abilities? The course aims to review the current state of the art regarding these questions and provide a forum for evaluation of different accounts from a cross-linguistic perspective.