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Semester 2

Language and Cognition (PSYL10171)

Subject

Psychology

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

3

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Visiting students must be studying Psychology as their degree major, and have completed at least 3 Psychology courses at grade B or above. We will only consider University/College level courses. **Please see Additional Restrictions below**

Course Summary

This course examines the relationship between language and cognition: How we talk, and how we think. We will examine questions like: Do we think using language? Do people who speak different languages think about the world in different ways? How does our language impact our social identity? And how do our cultures depend upon our languages? To answer these questions, we will examine theories and data from cognitive and social psychology, from cultural psychology, from psychophysics, and from developmental psychology.

Course Description

BPS Core area - Developmental, Cognitive: The course covers the relationship between how we think and how we talk. It examines how this relationship influences perception, cognition, and - especially - development. The goals of the course are to: (a) Introduce important theories and phenomena concerning the relationship between language and thought; (b) Understand how this relationship arises from mutual influence between individuals and culture in the dynamic context of development; (c) Illustrate these mechanisms in various domains (e.g., perception, thinking and reasoning, social cognition) in the first part of the course, and study in more depth how they contribute to changes in one specific domain (development) in the second part of the course; (d) Provide students with an introduction to some of the methods used within this area of cognitive science including experimentation, formal theory development, and statistical methods. **The course will develop students' skills at critical analysis and writing. It will also offer students the opportunity to apply their developing skills with the R language to analyze data on language and thought.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%

Additional Restrictions

Unless you are nominated on a Psychology exchange agreement, visiting students are only permitted to enrol in one 3rd year Psychology course each, per semester, before the start of the relevant semester’s welcome period – and spaces on each course are limited so cannot be guaranteed for any student. Enrolment in a second course from this group will depend on whether there are still spaces available in the January Welcome Period, and cannot be guaranteed. It is NOT appropriate for students to contact staff within this subject area to ask for an exception to be made; all enquiries to enrol in these courses must be made through the CAHSS Visiting Student Office. This is due to the extremely limited number of spaces available in this very popular subject area.

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