Typical and Atypical Language Development from Infancy to Adolescence (10787)

Authors: Gal Ben-Yehudah, Bracha Nir, Batia Sarusi, Gila Tubul

Credits: 4 intermediate credits in Education

Prerequisites: Introduction to Statistics for Students of Social Sciences I, Research Methods in Social Sciences: Guiding Principles and Research Styles.

Recommended: One of the following: Educational Psychology (or Introduction to Psychology), Developmental Psychology.


This course describes the development of language from infancy to adolescence. The first part of the course discusses patterns in typical development of language. Students will be introduced to the field of language development and to the major theories on acquisition and learning of language. Developmental patterns of typical language development in Hebrew will be discussed for each linguistic field: phonology, semantics, morphology, syntax, and discourse. The second part of the course focuses on impaired development of language, which results from a deficit in the representation and organization of linguistic knowledge. The main topics discussed are issues in the definition of (specific) language impairments, biological and environmental influences on language development, and theories regarding the source of deficits in language impairment. Throughout the course, basic terminology and concepts in linguistics will be introduced to provide a better understanding of the processes underlying language development.

Topics: Language and its development; phonological development, lexical development; morphological development; syntactic and discourse development; developmental language impairments; biological and environmental influences on language development; domain-general & domain-specific theories of language development.