What is language?  How do we so easily and instinctively acquire and understand our native language?  This is a class about language knowledge, language development, and language processing in normal humans, exceptional humans, and non-humans.  During the first half of the semester, we will be examining normative language behavior in humans.  Speech production, speech perception and sentence processing will be addressed.   In the second half of the semester we explore language behaviors or apparent language behaviors in neurologically damaged individuals, savants, and retardeds, as well as in non-humans and machines.   We will attempt to determine whether or not these special subjects possess a true knowledge of language.