Language Acquisition I
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this course on how children acquiring their native language master morpho-syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Lectures and readings survey major findings in first-language acquisition research, drawing mostly on English data while comparing acquisition patterns across other languages where relevant. The course connects developmental evidence to broader debates in linguistic theory and learnability theory, asking what children's errors and timelines reveal about the structure of grammar itself. Materials include the syllabus, lecture notes, readings drawn from the acquisition literature, and problem sets used in MIT's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. No enrollment fee is required to access the materials, and there is no certificate offered, consistent with MIT OpenCourseWare's standard model. The course assumes some prior background in linguistics and is pitched at an advanced undergraduate or graduate level.