Advanced Psycholinguistics

高級心理語言學

Fall 2026       Thursday 14:10-17:00         文學院 (Humanities) 413

編號 (Course code number): 1306560

 

UPDATED 2026/9/11

 

Other Web resources

 

Me:

James Myers (麥傑)

Office: 文學院247

Tel: x31506

Email: Lngmyers at the university address

Office hours: Thursday 10:00-noon, or by appointment (made at least 24 hours ahead)

 

Goals:

This class will teach you lots of stuff about how the mind/brain processes language, and how to read and write original research articles. However, the only way in which this class is “advanced” is that you will learn about all sorts of topics that go beyond the introductory psycholinguistics class. So you do NOT need prior experience with psycholinguistics to take this class!

 

Grading:

20% Class participation

40% Leading discussion

40% Term paper (due 12/14)

 

What the class is like:

This class is a discussion class. All we will do is read papers (real ones, not from a textbook) and discuss them together. So class participation means you discuss: you read, think, talk, and respond to others’ ideas.

Every week somebody will lead the discussion on the week’s reading(s), using a handout with questions to inspire us to discuss together. The questions should be organized in a logical way to make sure we address the most important issues in the paper, situating them in a larger context, but your questions should also allow us to clarify smaller points in the paper that may be confusing. You are encouraged to ask questions that even you don’t know how to answer, but you are the one responsible to bring the focus back to the big issues if we get lost. Post your questions to the eCourse2 system by 12 noon on class day, so I can download them and show them in class.

By 11/19 (but the earlier the better), you should choose a topic of your own to write about. The only restriction is that it has to report your own new psycholinguistic experiment on real people, even if it doesn’t relate directly to any of the class readings. After you choose your topic, the class discussions will then turn to focus on papers that you choose to help you with your project.

At the end of the semester (12/17), everybody will give a short, informal, ungraded presentation of their research, just to get feedback from everybody. The paper is due one week later (12/24) as a PDF emailed to me by 5 pm. The paper should be about 10-20 pages, in “English”, with formatting like the real papers we read. I’ll grade them in the usual way (style, logic, theory).

Obviously, you should submit your classwork on time and shouldn’t plagiarize. Moreover, when writing your discussion questions, presentation, and term paper, you cannot use AI for anything except English help, unless you check with me first (e.g., it may be OK to use AI to help with data management, but the precise usage matters, so don’t start until you check with me).

 

Schedule

* marks due dates for things relating to your paper

Week	Topic/Activity	Readings (30-40 pages per week)	Leaders
9/10	What is psycholinguistics anyway?		Myers
9/17	What human language is like	Arnon et al. (2025) Blasi et al. (2022)	Myers
9/24	The evolution of language	Berthet et al. (2025) Ekström et al. (2024) Kirby et al. (2026) Miyagawa et al. (2025)	Cathy Benson Ray Ben
10/1	Language in machines	Mahowald et al. (2024) Tuckute et al. (2024)	Ben Benson
10/8	Language and music	Karbanova & Cui (2026) Li et al. (2023)	Ray Benson
10/15	Language in dreams & fiction	Davydova et al. (2026) Dollnick & Schredl (2024) Wu et al. (2022)	Benson Benson Ben
10/22	Artificial script learning	Abu Ahmad & Share (2025) Acha et al. (2023)	Cathy Ben
10/29	Sign language processing	Lynne Nielson & Mayberry (2025) Wienholz & Lieberman (2025)	Ray Ben
11/5	Acceptability judgments	Christensen & Nyvad (2024)	Cathy
11/12	Sentence semantics	Brothers & Kuperberg (2021) Grodzinsky et al. (2020)	Cathy Benson
11/19	*Discuss paper topics
11/26	Your choice!	TBA	TBA
12/3	Your choice!	TBA	TBA
12/10	Your choice!	TBA	TBA
12/17	*Presentations [last class]
12/24	*TERM PAPER DUE

 

Readings

Abu Ahmad, H., & Share, D. L. (2025). Beginning reading instruction: Syllables or phonemes? An experimental training study with Arabic-speaking preliterate preschoolers. Developmental Psychology, 61(7), 1325.

Acha, J., Rodriguez, N., & Perea, M. (2023). The role of letter knowledge acquisition ability on children's decoding and word identification: Evidence from an artificial orthography. Journal of Research in Reading, 46(4), 358-375.

Arnon, I., Carmel, L., Claidière, N., Fitch, W. T., Goldin-Meadow, S., Kirby, S., ... & Fisher, S. E. (2025). What enables human language? A biocultural framework. Science, 390(6775), eadq8303.

Berthet, M., Surbeck, M., & Townsend, S. W. (2025). Extensive compositionality in the vocal system of bonobos. Science, 388(6742), 104-108.

Blasi, D. E., Henrich, J., Adamou, E., Kemmerer, D., & Majid, A. (2022). Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26(12), 1153-1170.

Brothers, T., & Kuperberg, G. R. (2021). Word predictability effects are linear, not logarithmic: Implications for probabilistic models of sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 116, 104174.

Christensen, K. R., & Nyvad, A. M. (2024). Complexity, frequency, and acceptability. Glossa, 9(1).

Davydova, T., Marin, L. M., Vives, M. L., Pérez, M. B., Rubio, E. C., Visser, M., & Costumero, V. (2026). Reading fiction in a foreign language reduces the neural synchronization between semantic and emotional areas. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 29(3), 576-587.

Dollnick, D., & Schredl, M. (2024). Languages in dreams: A diary study. International Journal of Dream Research, 17(1), 95-100.

Ekström, A. G., Gannon, C., Edlund, J., Moran, S., & Lameira, A. R. (2024). Chimpanzee utterances refute purported missing links for novel vocalizations and syllabic speech. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 17135.

Grodzinsky, Y., Deschamps, I., Pieperhoff, P., Iannilli, F., Agmon, G., Loewenstein, Y., & Amunts, K. (2020). Logical negation mapped onto the brain. Brain Structure and Function, 225(1), 19-31.

Karbanova, A., & Cui, A. X. (2026). Music speaks louder than lyrics: a conceptual priming experiment. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 1659797.

Kirby, S., Okanoya, K., Garland, E. C., Takahasi, M., & Arnon, I. (2026). Language-like statistical structure arises in learned signaling: evidence from birdsong. Science Advances, 12(32), eaea3015.

Li, D., Wang, X., Li, Y., Song, D., & Ma, W. (2023). Resource sharedness between language and music processing: An ERP study. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 67, 101136.

Lynne Nielson, S., & Mayberry, R. I. (2025). Production of real signs but not pseudosigns affected by age of acquisition in American Sign Language. Memory & Cognition, 53(5), 1356-1379.

Mahowald, K., Ivanova, A. A., Blank, I. A., Kanwisher, N., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Fedorenko, E. (2024). Dissociating language and thought in large language models. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 28(6), 517-540.

Miyagawa, S., DeSalle, R., Nóbrega, V. A., Nitschke, R., Okumura, M., & Tattersall, I. (2025). Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1503900.

Tuckute, G., Sathe, A., Srikant, S., Taliaferro, M., Wang, M., Schrimpf, M., ... & Fedorenko, E. (2024). Driving and suppressing the human language network using large language models. Nature Human Behaviour, 8(3), 544-561.

Wienholz, A., & Lieberman, A. M. (2025). Tracking effects of age of sign language acquisition and phonology in American Sign Language sentence processing. Memory & Cognition, 53(7), 2009-2027.

Wu, F., Zhou, M., & Zhang, Z. (2022). Can science fiction engagement predict identification with all humanity? Testing a moderated mediation model. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 943069.