This course focuses on the psychological processes that underlie the use of language and speech. Do humans have a linguistic brain, or cognitive brain that can do linguistic tricks? Is language competence different from other human skills? Is language a biological, a psychological, a cultural phenomenon, or all of these?

Why do people speak with an accent? Why do we forget words (and why do we remember them)?

Content: the course will provide insight in (1) the psychological reality of linguistic models; (2) the origins of language, (3) neurolinguistics, (4) the relation between sound, speech, and language, (5) the nature of the mental lexicon and lexical access, (6) processing syntactic structures, (7) the trajectory from intention to articulation, (8) bilingualism and language diversity, (9) the psycholinguistics of language breakdown, (10) the psychology of everyday use of language.