From ordering a cup of tea from a barista to exchanging abstract ideas with coursemates, human interactions are frequently goal-based and collaborative. To achieve shared goals, people exchange information and coordinate joint action using some form of spoken, gestured, or written language. In this course we will cover our current understanding of how people use and learn to use language in situated interactions and how this sheds light on our language abilities and language’s relationship to general cognition. We will cover topics that range from speech production and comprehension, word usage, pragmatic inference, and learning.
