• Maillat Didier

A prominent school in contemporary linguistics considers language as one of many cognitive phenomena, where cognition is conceived as the set of mental processes that govern decision making (inferences), knowledge construction (representations), information processing (operations on representations). As a result, language and language use in particular are regarded as reflecting these underlying general cognitive processes. It is this very relationship that will be investigated in our seminar. We will see how our use of English is guided by general cognitive principles. Interestingly, we will unfold both the positive and negative impact of this relationship, as we will look into the cognitive principles that facilitate language processing, but also those that seem to hinder this same processing. We will also question the directionality of this relationship asking ourselves whether a language like English can influence cognition.

One of the goals of this seminar is for students to familiarise themselves with experimental methodology and to work on the different stages involved in building a scientific hypothesis, building an experimental design to test it and analysing the results.

• methodological and practical approach to carrying empirical research with linguistic data in English
• theoretical and methodological tools used to investigate the relation between cognition and the English language
• knowledge of the current relevant issues in the field
• critical evaluation of scientific papers

A bibliography and a list of assigned readings will be made available in the first week of the semester.