ATS2679-ATS3679: Psycholinguistics and Child Language Acquisition

5%: Class attendance
10%: Class preparation
10%: 2nd/3rd year assignment
45%: Research essay
25%: End of year examination

Here, I will run through the different assessment tasks.

Class attendance:
I'm assuming you need to attend a particular number of seminars to get the 5%. However, my timetable meant that I attended every seminar, resulting in the ignorance that now sees me speculating as to how many seminars you need to attend. Regardless, it's an easy 5%.

Class preparation:
This comes in the form of weekly exercises, typically consisting of 3-4 (very) short questions. These questions may relate to the textbook readings or other (provided) sources. Again, an easy enough 10%. It's worth noting that accuracy of responses is immaterial; should you make some kind of effort and submit on time, you should get the marks. I think the point of this was simply to get you thinking about the topic of the week before the seminar.

2nd/3rd year assignment:
This is really the only difference between taking the unit at 2nd or 3rd year level. Those taking the unit at 2nd year level needed to make some kind of essay proposal, directly relating to the major essay outlined below. I didn't do this, so I'm not 100% what it involves, but from what I have gleaned, it consists of explaining a potential topic, looking around for potential resources, and discussing potential methodology for your essay. All of the 3rd years would have had to have done this, too, to some extent, in preparation for the major essay (but for no marks).

Comparatively, those taking the unit at 3rd year level were required to make a 'journal'. I'm not really sure why it's labelled as such, because it's nothing like my understanding of journals. Rather, the task required two potential topics of examination related to the content covered in the course to that point, but not directly taken from any material. That is, students had to take inspiration from the content covered and formulate their own research questions. Then, for each of the two questions, students had to explain methodology that could be used to investigate the topic, potential methodological problems and the population used. At least two scientific journals also had to be incorporated. Noteworthy is the fact that you don't actually have to conduct the research; rather, you just need to explain how you would do so. Each question is worth 5%. There was nothing particularly difficult about this task apart from the word limit (200-250 words for each question). I found it very difficult to get all of the required information into such a small word count. I also found the feedback to this task to be a little vague - in fact, I'm still not really sure how I scored.

Research essay:
Anna introduced this essay very early in the piece, which I think was a good idea. She warned us that by the end of the semester, we would probably hate this particular assignment (based on past students' feedback). That was an accurate prediction, I suppose, but it was probably avoidable. In the essay, you need to develop your own research question. A significant part of the essay is that it must be based on data from the CHILDES Database, which makes research question choice fairly crucial. Basically, the essay requires you to compare a particular linguistic topic in regard to two groups (the more specific, the better). For example, my essay investigated utterance type (declarative, imperative, interrogative, exclamative) development in boys with Down syndrome versus girls with Down syndrome.

The assignment is labelled as an essay, and I think this is where a bit of confusion comes in. From what I gathered, there was a little anxiety within the cohort because people didn't really know where to start. That was certainly the case with me, at least. When I discussed this with Anna, it became apparent that what was required was actually more of a scientific write-up than a typical essay. As such, my assignment finished with multiple sub-headings (basically adhering to psychology conventions), graphs and a lot of data. The assignment, I think, would have been less stressful - and it was fairly taxing - had this been made clear from the outset. Regardless, I enjoyed my topic for the most part, and it was probably my favourite part of the unit by the end. The due date for this assessment was (I think) five and a half weeks ago, and we still haven't received our grades. Considering that I misread the due date and finished mine a week and a half early, it feels like an eternity without feedback.

End of year exam:
The exam consisted of five sections. The first two were (very) short answer; the third required slightly lengthier responses; the final two sections were more 'case-study'-esque, giving you transcripts and then asking questions based on those transcripts.

The content and structure of the exam itself was fine. However, the organisation of the exam could have been better. The exam was at Clayton rather than Caulfield, which was fine, except we didn't find out what room the exam was in until well into the examination period. The time of the exam changed the night before, which was very frustrating for me (it changed from 9am to 10.15am). Then, the exam room changed about 15 minutes before the exam was scheduled to begin. This all disrupted my usual exam routines, but perhaps others are more flexible. Lastly - and most annoyingly - the exam was only meant to run for one hour, but it ended up going for about 150% of that, and students could simply keep writing for as long as they wished. The exam was quite long, so I had rushed to get through it in the hour, and finished bang on, so it was frustrating to think that I could have taken my time more. Of course, I used the extra time, but only to go back and fix the errors that I wouldn't have made in the first place if the length of the exam had been made clear.
Overall, I would recommend this unit to anybody interested in (obviously) child language acquisition, but also anybody interested in psychology in general. It's a very interesting unit with a fantastic lecturer, and could be a great stepping stone to careers such as speech pathology.

Dr. Anna Margetts. Anna is a very good and engaging lecturer - no complaints, there. Anna is very approachable; I spoke to her a couple of times about various things, and she gave me more of her time than could be reasonably expected of a lecturer. She clearly cares about her students' learning and well-being, which is appreciated. We also had one seminar in which current Honours students came in and talked to us about their present studies.

No idea.

3.5 out of 5 (but only due to minor grievances with the organisation of the unit - the actual content is worthy of 4.5/5 at least)

Yes. I'm assuming that there was also screen capture, but I never watched the online lectures.

First Language Acquisition by Eve Clark. I wouldn't say that it is absolutely necessary, but it was helpful for some of the weekly exercises. You could probably get away with borrowing it from the library when needed.

1x two hour seminar per week

Semester 2, 2014.

N/A