Teaching
How do we learn and process language(s), and why do some people find it easier than others? Teaching in our chair addresses these and related questions by focusing on experimental linguistics, multilingualism, language processing and acquisition, and the relationship between language and other cognitive processes.
Our courses invite students to explore some of the most interesting questions in first and second language acquisition. We examine how children learn to speak, what kinds of errors they make along the way, and how this differs from learning a second language later in life. We also consider whether children are indeed more successful language learners than adults, why some individuals appear to learn languages more easily than others, and what cognitive processes support language learning.
Multilingualism is another central focus. We invite students to engage with it from different perspectives, addressing questions such as whether something like a “perfect bilingual” exists, how knowledge of one’s first language affects the learning and processing of others – and vice versa –, and how multiple languages influence one another within the same speaker. In addition, we explore how spoken and written language differ, and how learning to read and write influences language development.
Our teaching has a strong empirical and hands-on component. Students are offered the opportunity to learn how to extract and analyse data from corpora, design and run experiments to test specific hypotheses, and work with both spoken and numerical data. Courses also introduce statistical methods and show how to present results clearly and effectively.
Many classes include interactive research projects. For example, in previous semesters, students have developed their own artificial languages (including videos and sentence materials) and used them to investigate how people learn new linguistic systems from scratch; work that has, in some cases, led to publication (see here for the materials of this project and the resulting publication). Other projects examine how individual differences, such as acting ability or the tendency to imitate, relate to second language learning.
Supervision
We are interested in supervising BA and MA projects in the following key areas:
- First language acquisition
- Additional (second, foreign, or heritage) language acquisition in childhood and adulthood
- Individual differences in learning: how variation in cognitive abilities and input shapes learning outcomes
- Literacy and instruction: the relationship between oral language skills and literacy development, and how instruction interacts with learners’ cognitive abilities and the linguistic target.
- Language learning aptitude and metalinguistic awareness in children and adults
- etc.
Please feel free to get in touch with us to discuss potential projects.
If you are interested in joining the Chair of Language and Cognition as a PhD student, please get in touch with Prof. Dr. Ewa Dąbrowska (ewa.dabrowska@fau.de).