Opportunities for Students in Research
Linguistics Department Research Directory
Projects summaries are listed below, as well as information about whether professors are seeking students to be involved in their research.
The types of positions we advertise are either...
- Volunteer: Unpaid; hours and length of commitment are variable;
- Paid Research Assistantship: Paid from a research grant or department funds; hours and length of commitment are variable;
- Work-Study: Paid by Financial Aid & Awards. For eligibility and to apply, visit the SFU Work-Study program.
** NEW FOR FALL 2021: In order to increase the number of paid undergraduate research opportunties, we are launching a pilot program aimed at NEW students who have not previously been employed as RAs in Linguistics. If you're interested in volunteering or working as an RA, please fill out this application (you will need an unofficial student transcript and recent resume). You may apply to more than one project in your application.
Key Dates:
August 3, 2021: Positions for the Fall semester posted
August 9, 2021: Deadline to apply for Fall positions
This page is under ongoing development. Please check back regularly for updates.
| Professor, Project Information | Seeking Students? |
|---|---|
| John Alderete Cognition, Computational linguistics, Corpus linguistics Investigating the language of aphasics: We will investigate the language behaviour of aphasics, including one word production tasks, spontaneous speech, and word retrieval tasks, by exploring open data sets and building computational models. The first part will involve substantial reading (most of first term), followed by collection and organization of language data from online data repositories. Duties:
|
Yes, 1 New RA in Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 5 hrs/week for two terms. Ideal qualifications:
|
| John Alderete Cognition, Experimental linguistics, Computational linguistics The Language Cognition and Computation (LCC) learning community connects linguistic structures with computational methods in projects that investigate human cognition. The LCC is currently working on using network science tools to investigate linguistic systems and psycholinguistic behavior. Planned projects involve analyzing the similarity structure of the lexicons of under-studied languages, and using network science to analyze disordered speech. The LCC meets once a month via zoom to plan and co-ordinate project work. All SFU students are invited to be part of the LCC learning community. |
Yes, volunteer only Join monthly meetings, undertake research concerning language cognition and computation. Note: No direct supervision outside monthly meetings, intended as a learning community rather than a lab position. |
| Ashley Farris-Trimble Acquisition, Phonology, Perception, Experimental linguistics Learning Opacity: Tracks children’s acquisition of complex phonological processes. Children between the age of 3 and 9 (and adult control group) will perform an online task where they will be asked to match nonsense words with their corresponding suffixed form. These results will show us how children understand phonological patterns and how they generalize them to new words. The student will work with a team of RAs to:
|
Yes, 1 New RA in Fall 2021 or Spring 2022 5 hrs/week. The ideal student will:
|
| Nancy Hedberg Pragmatics, Semantics, Corpus linguistics Corpus Pragmatics and Prosody (virtual) Lab: Assist in lab corpus linguistics projects on questions, clefts, demonstratives, and other information-structure-sensitive constructions. Duties include:
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Yes, 1 New RA and 1-3 volunteers in Fall 2021 5 hrs/week. Ideal qualifications:
|
| Henny Yeung Acquisition, Bilingualism, Experimental linguistics Community: Describing bilingualism in detail, recording language input for children 2-6 years old in bilingual families. Claims have also been made about bilingualism and some linguistic and executive functions, so we are aiming to do online and in-person studies to collect data on these topics. Duties:
|
Yes, 1-2 volunteers in Fall 2021 4 hrs/week. Ideally, students will be available for at least 2 terms and have completed LING 350. |
Yue Wang Phonetics, Production, Perception, Experimental linguistics Audio-visual speech production experiments. Duties may include:
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1 New RA and 1-2 volunteers in Spring 2022 5 hrs/week. Qualifications:
|
| Henny Yeung Perception, Experimental linguistics FaceScan: We are using eye-tracking experiments to study how English-speakers try to perceive which [English or Mandarin] sentence a muted video is presenting. The volunteer will run participants in person. |
1 volunteer in Spring 2022 4 hrs/week. Ideally, students will be available for at least 2 terms. |
Henny Yeung Production, Acquisition, Prosody, Experimental linguistics L2-IDS: We are studying the speech prosody of infant-directed speech from parents speaking their non-native language using day-long recordings. Duties will include:
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1 new RA in Summer 2022 7-8 hrs/week. Preferred qualifications:
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Please direct any suggestions/corrections to the Research Grants and Projects Coordinator.