Research Opportunities for Undergrads

For those interested in becoming involved in linguistics research, please check back in July when we will be recruiting candidates for Fall, 2026. Note that participation in the Linguistic Field Research Lab is an ongoing opportunity. Please see details below.

FUTURE APPLICATION PERIODS:
Fall 2026: July, 2026
Spring 2027: November, 2026
Summer 2027: March, 2027

Our research opportunities are either paid or volunteer, as noted in the description. Volunteer positions often lead to paid RAships in later semesters. The hours and length of commitment vary, depending on the project. Paid RAships are funded by the supervisor's research grant or the Linguistics endowment fund.

Applications are assessed on the basis of academic excellence and stated qualifications. All applicants will be informed by email regarding the outcome of their submission.

Professor, Project Information Seeking Students? (Yes/No) and Further Details
Yue Wang
Experimental phonetics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics

Language and Brain Lab: Seeking a team of volunteer RAs to work on the project Adaptations in Conversation: Engaging voices, faces, brains and machines. Paid position may be available after RA's initial semester(s). Duties to include:
  • • Experiment development
  • • Data collection
  • • Data analysis
  • • Audio and video recording of human speech
Open to: Current SFU undergraduate students in LING, Cognitive Science, or related fields (3rd-year students preferred)



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No (closed): 3+ volunteer RAs for Summer 2026
5 hrs/wk (plus 1-hr weekly lab meeting)
Qualifications:
  • • Completion of an undergraduate course in phonetics
  • • Experience with acoustic analysis of speech sounds (Praat)
  • • Experience with statistics
Optional/preferred experience:
  • • Statistical analysis (e.g., R)
  • • Computer science/AI
  • • Audio/video editing
  • • Neuroimaging techniques (e.g., MEG)
Jozina Vander Klok
Field linguistics, language documentation, language description, fieldwork methodologies, linguistic analysis

Linguistic Field Research Lab: All interested students are invited to join the lab's weekly reading group discussions. The group meets weekly on Thursdays from 3:30-4:30 pm, in-person or online (Summer schedule TBA). The focus is on research surrounding topics on language documentation, language description, fieldwork methodologies, as well as on linguistic analysis of data. The reading group began meeting in October, 2025 and started with several chapters from Applicative Constructions in the World's Languages (eds. Zúñiga & Creissels, 2024), with the goals of (i) building a dataset for systematic comparison of some of the morphosyntactic alternations and (ii) creating a questionnaire for linguistic field research. Anyone can join this research and discussion series; however, it is volunteer-only at this point. Students are also welcome to share ongoing research on this topic.
Open to: Current SFU students.
To join: Email lingrsch@sfu.ca.



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YES (ongoing, volunteer)
1-hr weekly meeting (drop-in)
Qualifications:
  • • Interest in field linguistics, language documentation, language description, and fieldwork methodologies
Note: No direct supervision outside of weekly meetings. This is intended as a learning community rather than a lab position.

If you have any questions about these opportunities or about the application process, please contact the Research Coordinator.