Language Acquisition

<p>This course is an introduction to language acquisition, a subfield of linguistics whose goal is to understand how humans acquire the ability to speak and understand a language—a highly complex task that is routinely and seemingly effortlessly accomplished by competent (native) speakers of the language in the first few years of life and without explicit instruction. By contrast, acquiring a second language after the critical period takes a long time, is effortful, usually requires explicit in…

The syllabus, on MIT OpenCourseWare

The full course — syllabus, assigned readings, problem sets, exams, and lecture notes — lives on OCW. These open the real thing: