Language Acquisition

Spring 1997; Olanike Ola Orie

This course isn't listed in the current catalogue, for the catalogue is after my time at Tulane. The equivalent course, ANTH 367 Language and its Acquisition, is described thus, however: Introduction to issues such as language and its relation to animal communication [not discussed in the class I took]; the genetic basis of language ability and acquisition [sorta what we talked about]; neurological aspects of linguistic knowledge [hmmm...]; first language acquisition [yes, yes! this is what 309 was]. Emphasis will be laid on data collection, description, and analysis. I should have just looked at the syllabus first. Here are the course objectives as laid out there: to get an overview of the acquisition of linguistic knowledge; to become acquainted with some special features of first language acquisition; to gain fluency in collecting child language data.

This had the potential to be a really good class. Unfortunately, it was filled with annoying, whiney dolts who hadn't a clue about linguistics and were just trying to fill a requirement for their anthropology majors.

Selected Topics from the Syllabus

Projects and Papers

Child Speech Analysis. We had to get a 1- to 3-year-old child and gather a sufficient amount of language data from it to do a more-or-less detailed linguistic analysis. This is the write-up from that, which I didn't start working on until 2 a.m. on the day it was due, and had it ready to hand in at 9 a.m. Also included is the handout I used for the presentation we had to give. I was the first person who thought of using a handout, and subsequent presenters copied me. One person in particular (one of the 3 people in that class whom I really, really loathed) completely stole the format of my handout. A grad student no less, he should have known better.

Text and Readings



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