This course focuses on the psychological processes that underlie the acquisition and the use of language. There is an emphasis on the interaction between linguistic skills and other cognitive skills. The course also looks at flexibility of language and language use, and the influence of psycholinguistic processes on reading and writing, the social use of language, and language in other modalities. There will be a focus on learnability and teachability issues.

Content: the course will provide insight in (1) acquisition and learnability,  (2) the biopsychology of language (neuro-linguistics, linguistic genetics) (3) the micro-genesis of speech (the Levelt model), (4) perceptual processes, (5) expressive mechanisms, (6) multimodality, (7) bilingualism and variation, (8) interaction between language and cognition (9) a psycholinguistic approach to breakdown (i.e., pathology).