Linguistics

Also see Department Website:
http://web.gc.cuny.edu/Linguistics/

The M.A./Ph.D. Program in Linguistics aims to equip students for a career in scientific research on diverse aspects of human language. Students have opportunities to study a variety of topics in general and theoretical linguistics, as well as applications of linguistics to a number of practical problems. The program maintains its own computer and psycholinguistic laboratories and, with the cooperation of other programs, offers students access to excellent facilities for research in phonetics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and computational linguistics. The program also offers a terminal master’s degree in Linguistics.

Specializations

Language acquisition includes both First Language Acquisition (FLA) and Second Language Acquisition (SLA). In addition to the scientific study of language acquisition, the program provides students with explicit preparation for careers in academic programs designed to educate language teachers. It offers a specialization in sentence processing, with a particular interest in comparing how speakers of Japanese and English process sentences. Students in the program may also specialize in the study of pidgins and creoles. Computational linguistics, another area within the program, is the application of linguistics to the use of computers in machine translation, human-machine communication, and other areas where linguistics and computer science overlap. Students can also study psychophonology, the application of experimental psychology to the study of speech perception. The program offers a background in sociolinguistics, the study of the interaction of society and language, including Spanish in New York City, and other topics in the linguistic realities of urban centers.

Many of the above specializations are strongly related to the interdisciplinary area of cognitive science, represented by an interdisciplinary concentration at the Graduate Center. The Linguistics program also collaborates with the Interdisciplinary Concentration in Language and Literacy, which studies language use in reading and writing.