Language Acquisition and Development

Bangor University’s MSc in Language Acquisition and Development course aims to develop your understanding of monolingual and bilingual development and acquisition in typically-developing children, and adults, as well as children with language impairments.

The course curriculum includes modules in typical and atypical language development in both monolingual and bilingual (simultaneous and sequential) populations. The purpose of the MSc programme is to provide you with the necessary theoretical and methodological skills to undertake research in this field.

We are an accessible, friendly Department whose staff who are passionate about passing on their expertise and subject knowledge and committed to delivering the highest quality learning experience for our students. Our research informs our teaching provision at all levels, with our students benefitting from enthusiastic staff at the cutting-edge of academic enquiry and developments. Our staff is committed to providing an excellent student experience with strong personalized student support throughout the duration of your MSc in Language Acquisition and Development studies.

Following taught components, students on this degree will complete an independent research-based Masters level dissertation project. The staff in our Department provide excellent personalized supervision and academic support for dissertations on wide range of language acquisition and development topics using applied, theoretical, experimental, corpus-based or ethnographic methodological frameworks. These include are not limited to: psycholinguistics, child language acquisition, 2nd language acquisition, discourse analysis, SLA and language teaching, corpus linguistics, language and communication, phonetics & phonology, morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics, language variation and change, language and communication, bilingualism and multilingualism and Welsh linguistics.

Students on our Language Acquisition and Development MA can use state-of-the-art learning facilities which include:

A professional grade sound / recording studio and speech laboratory (with Yamaha, Alesis and RØDE recording equipment)

An eye tracking laboratory (with a Tobii Pro X2-60 eye tracker)

An event-related potential (ERP) laboratory (with an actiCHamp Plus ERP machine) • And dedicated corpus-linguistics software and resources.

Our staff also have expertise in and provide support for:

Statistical software such as: SPSS, R-Statistics and Excel.

Experimental psychology software such as E-Prime, GORILLA Experiment Builder, Open Sesame and Webexp.

Acoustic and phonetic analysis software such as: Audacity, Praat, and SIL Speech Analyzer

Standardised psychometric /language tests (e.g., EVT, BPVS, NARA, WISC, K-BIT, TROG, CELF)

A wide range of specialized corpora and concordance software including CHILDES and CLAN

At Bangor you will be part of a vibrant, innovative post graduate research community which is supported through various events throughout the year, ranging from individual talks to informal seminars and workshops to large conferences. Many of these are open not just to academic staff, but also to students and to the general public.