Homeworks & Handouts
perceptual-dialectology perceptual dialectology
Map-drawing task for region of small-group's choosing, with follow-up prompts inspired by Preston, D.
langportraits linguistic self-portraits
Color-coded to reflect individuals' repertoires of languages, dialects, features...plus paired interview guide.
hockett design features checklist
Students evaluate an expressive system of their choosing with respect to Hockett's Design Features.
aliens alien language
Students evaluate an alien language with respect to properties of human languages.
nitwit universalism mini-quiz
Languages Nitwit and Blubber carve up the world of color differently.
brown Eve mini-lab
Students identify child language acquisition concepts in an excerpt from the Brown corpus.
child-lang-lab child language mini-lab
Students infer (partial) word meanings and morphosyntactic errors in a sample of their choosing.
langportraits (family) language portraits
Template to collect family language histories and environments.
phillables phillablez
Fillable templates for distilling empirical research, inspired by the Philz Coffee app.
dev-psych dev intro survey
Introductory survey for Developmental Psychology classes online or in person.
checkin daily check-in
Discussion groups assess and report on their level of certainty with course material.
examq exam question generation
Discussion groups generate questions to be considered for the exam.
infographic-rubric additional resources
Curated links to linguistic, developmental resources for students.
novel-purple infographic rubric
Rubric for grading infographic assignments (student example).

Activities & Demos
cactus-flower aces game
Role-playing game teaches small groups about adverse childhood experiences and biological sensitivity to context.
variable-bubbles building an empirical argument
Slides on how to identify your hypothesis and the literature you need to support it.
fast-mapping-entity fast mapping
Simple in-class demonstration of fast mapping and novel word extension.
wcs slow mapping
children infer the boundaries of adult color categories for diverse global languages.
hsp human simulation paradigm
Demonstration of syntactic bootstrapping and the human simulation paradigm.
cross-situational cross-situational word-learning
Short demonstration suitable for museums or mobile science outreach.
box the box project
Short in-class demonstration of black box metaphor for cognitive science, adapted from Hardcastle & Slater (2014).
lang-portrait-pop language & culture
Informal survey to solicit student intuitions about relation between language and cultural identity.
research-toy research toys
Word-learning and numberline "research toy" interpretation guides.
aoa age of acquisition norms
AoA estimates according to archived M-CDIs (via Wordbank; accessed 2016), versus Kuperman et al. (2012).

Reading & Inspiration
resources William Labov on Linguistics
How I Got Into Linguistics, and What I Got Out of It.
vivacious-maroon Toni Morrison on language
1993 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech.
limpet-blue Story of Your Life, by Ted Chiang
Sci-fi linguistic relativity.
creepy-rubber-baby-face-a-la-short-story I CAN SPEAK, by George Saunders
What if babies could say what we wanted to hear, sooner.
new yorker illustration Overture to dev psych, annotated
Kenneth Kaye (1982) on the first two years; 'baby labs' in The New Yorker

…"For" "Children"
invisible-alphabet The Invisible Alphabet
Basically Why It's Hard to Label Our Concepts, illustrated.
knuffle-bunny Knuffle Bunny
The frustration of being pre-linguistic.
they-all-saw They All Saw a Cat
Perspective-taking and concepts.
a-hole-is-to-dig A Hole is to Dig
Early semantics and teleological reasoning.
we-are-in We are in a Book!
Existential explosion.
pterodactyl P is for Pterodactyl
English orthography is pteroble.
there There
Deixis across time and space!
runny-babbit Runny Babbit
Spoonerisms.