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INX 199
Breaking the Code: How Children Learn Language
Fall 2005-Spring 2006
Announcements
Mar 28: Office hours on March 29 will be 1:30-3:30 (instead of 1-3).
Mar 8: Please note that 299Y Research Opportunities Program
(ROP) applications are due by 5pm, Friday, March 17th. To be
eligible, you must be an A&S St. George student who has completed the
equivalent of at least 4 full courses (and no more than 9) by May,
2006. This is a great chance to get involved in research early in
your UofT career. You can find more info here.
Mar 6: If you plan to send me your presentation so that you
can display it from my laptop, please don't forget that you have to
save the file in PowerPoint format! (I.e., use the "File->Save as"
command to convert to a .ppt file.) My machine cannot read openoffice
presentation format (.sxi); this is probably true if you're using your
own laptop as well, unless you've downloaded openoffice.
Feb 28: On Wednesday, March 15, I will hold office hours from
immediately after class until 1:15. If you need to see me and can't
make it during that hour, send me email and we can arrange an
alternative time.
Feb 20: Here is a sample draft
presentation file, based on Afra's class last week, to give you an
idea of slide format that you should aim for, for the tutorial March
1.
Feb 17: I emailed the presentation guidelines, but include
them here as well, for
your convenience.
Feb 14: Happy Valentine's Day!
I forgot to remind you that
your paper outline is due tomorrow (see the Course
Info Sheet). Since I forgot to remind you, if you don't bring it
tomorrow, you can email it to me NO LATER THAN FRIDAY (Feb 17). If you email
it, it must be in Word or in plain text.
Feb 8: Enjoy some language humour!
Feb 8: Another interesting
article, in CBC, on Nicaraguan sign language "creators".
Feb 7: There's a neat article in Slate on
language programs for "learning language like a child". I recommend
it -- and there's even a pointer to a demo you can try out!
Jan 27: I was mistaken in the dates I gave you in class for
the possible times for term project presentations. The dates you will
need to choose from are:
March 8
March 15
March 29
April 5
Sorry for the confusion -- please come prepared with a 1st, 2nd, 3rd
choice for these dates.
Jan 11: The course requirements
page also now has a link to the term project handout that I gave
you at the end of the term. Remember that your project proposal is
due next Wednesday, Jan 18, at the beginning of class.
Jan 10: The course requirements
page has been updated with the winter due dates for the two
in-class essays and the term project.
Afra will also distribute a winter term course info sheet at the first
class Jan 11 (tomorrow!), as well as your reading for Jan 18. The Course
Info Sheet gives the class schedule and due dates for the Winter
Term.
Dec 19: How about that Wikipedia? See article on the
accuracy of Wikipedia
vs. Britannica.
Dec 9: From now until Jan 11, I will have office hours by
appointment only. If you want to see me regarding your spring term
project (or anything else), send email to set a time.
Starting Jan 11, my office hours will be 1-3pm on Wed (instead of 2-4pm).
Dec 9: On January 11, the class will go to Robarts with Afra
(yay!). BUT first, you'll go to the lab to do some web access of the
library holdings. So please meet at the classroom at the normal time
to go to the lab.
Dec 5: I will be away from email from now until sometime
Tuesday. If you have questions about the assignment, please contact
Afra (and cc me). Afra's email address is her name (afra), followed by the
same @... as mine.
Nov 27: Your next assignment will be posted on the TA's
website. You will find it here, in pdf format,
when it is available.
Nov 17: Another clarification on Assignment 3: Do not count
any negative contractions for Sarah and Eve, such as ``didn't''.
Nov 17: Clarification on Assignment 3: You are not supposed
to look at the context for evaluating Sarah's and Eve's errors. For
those you should simply search for the correct and incorrect past
tense verb forms, not evaluating whether they used tenses
semantically correctly. Eg, if they use a correct past tense form
(such as ``came'') when they should have said the present tense
``comes'', that still counts as a correct usage of the past tense
since it's the right form. Or, if they incorrectly use a
present tense when they should have used a past tense, you won't even
find that!
You should only look at the context for Adam's errors, and then only
to clarify cases where it's not obvious whether the error is an
overregularization, or if it is, what kind.
Nov 16: By popular request, I am posting some guidelines for answering the
questions on Assignment 3. These are intended to give you some ideas
of things you should be looking for in the data, and asking yourself.
Nov 16: There were questions after class about what we were
looking for in the answers to the questions on Assignment 2; here are
some sample points.
Nov 9: It has come to my attention that some people's mail is
not getting through to me due to it looking to my spam filter like
spam. Since I get so much garbage winnowed out by that particular
filter, I can't check it manually. If you send me email and don't
hear from me within 24 hours (or even just a couple of hours, if it's
right before an assignment is due), then send me email from your
utoronto.ca address, don't put html in it (you can set this in your
mailer), and don't put lots of caps in the message.
Nov 9: I forgot something today in class when explaining
about the re-marking of question 1a. For people who got a 10/10, I
added a bonus of +2 for doing so well.
Nov 7: There is a talk by a UofT faculty member on the
evening of Nov 23 that is directly related to some of the issues we
have discussed regarding innateness and the role of pragmatics in
language acquisition. Here are the
details. It should be very interesting!
Nov 4: Clarification to assignment 2: Someone pointed out to
me that the reading and the assignment handout indicate a slightly
different syntax for the "freq" command than that given in the
tutorial notes. Specifically, before "*" in an options list, you must
use a "\" character (as shown in the tutorial examples).
This is because "*" is a special character on Linux/Unix systems, and
the "\" tells the system to treat it as the literal character. The
examples in the reading and assignment use the form as defined by the
CLAN system (and as you would type it if you used the Windows
version.)
Nov 3: Clarification to assignment 2: The NOTE at the end of
step 3 means that from that point on (in steps 4 through 7), you
should ONLY consider nouns and verbs in any calculations, and ONLY
those of frequency 10 or more.
Nov 2: Clarification to assignment 2: In Task II, you should
consider speech from any adult, not just caretakers. (This
wording is corrected in the assignment posted on the Assignments page.)
Old announcements: October.
September.
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