Research

The Endangered Language Initiative aims to promote the scientific study of endangered languages in the areas of teaching and research, and is also dedicated to educating the public and broader scientific community about the study of endangered languages. Opportunities for urban fieldwork on endangered languages are arranged in collaboration with the Endangered Language Alliance. The Initiative sponsors a talk series and other special events.

The Endangered Language Initiative is affiliated with the Mellon Committee on Globalization, an interdisciplinary research group at the Graduate Center.

Director: Juliette Blevins.

For more information, visit the project website or contact Juliette Blevins.

The Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society (RISLUS) conducts research on language, literacy, and bilingualism and their development and acquisition in urban societies. The central mission of RISLUS is to investigate those research questions that are at the nexus of language and the urban environment, especially in New York City.

Co-Directors:

• Gita Martohardjono
• Ricardo Otheguy

For more information, visit the project website or contact rislus@gc.cuny.edu.

The Audio-Aligned and Parsed Corpus of Appalachian English is an in-progress project. The ultimate product will be a 1-million word corpus of Appalachian English, with two basic components:

• Transcripts which are time-aligned with the speech signal, and fully text-searchable
• A part-of-speech tagged and parsed version of the transcripts

Project Collaborators:

• Christina Tortora, City University of New York (College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center)
• Beatrice Santorini, University of Pennsylvania
• Frances Blanchette, Center for Language Science, Penn State University (Research Assistant 2010-15, City University of New York, The Graduate Center)
• C.E.A. Diertani, City University of New York, The Graduate Center (Research Associate)

For more information, visit the project website or contact Christina Tortora.

The Corpus of New York City English (CUNY-CoNYCE) is an in-progress project which aims to further the study of New York City English (namely, the varieties of English particular to New York City and the surrounding region), through the development and use of an innovative audio-aligned and parsed corpus of New Yorkers’ speech. The ultimate goal of the project is to combine recent advances in speech corpus development tools with the special talents and backgrounds of CUNY undergraduates to create a database that will be a resource for researchers in all areas of linguistics. An additional goal is to provide valuable research experience for CUNY undergraduates.
The ultimate product will be a 1-million word corpus of New York City English, with two basic components:

• Transcripts which are time-aligned with the speech signal, and fully text-searchable
• A part-of-speech tagged and parsed version of the transcripts which are searchable online using structural queries

Principal Investigators:

• Christina Tortora, City University of New York (College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center)
• Cecelia Cutler, City University of New York (Lehman College and The Graduate Center)
• Bill Haddican, City University of New York (Queens College and The Graduate Center)
• Michael Newman, City University of New York (Queens College and The Graduate Center)
• Beatrice Santorini, University of Pennsylvania

For more information, visit the project website.

The Computational Linguistics Lab studies speech and language processing.. The lab has particular expertise in phonology, morphology, and language resource development. It is outfitted with 7 desktops with 12-core 3.2 GHZ i7 processors, 32 GB of RAM, and Nvidia GTX 1080 GPUs.

Housed by: CUNY Graduate Center

Director: Kyle Gorman

For more information, visit the lab website or contact kgorman@gc.cuny.edu

The Hunter College Language Acquisition Research Center has the goal of unraveling the mystery of the uniquely human gift of language. The center is directed by Dr. Virginia Valian of the Department of Psychology. Dr. Valian and her research team — students and research assistants — examine the important data that children can provide. Current research investigates knowledge and use of language in young monolingual English speakers (two- and three-year-olds) and bilingual adults.

Housed by: Hunter College

Director: Virginia Valian

Spring 2023 meetings are on Thursday mornings from 9am-11am.

For more information, visit the lab website or contact little.linguist@hunter.cuny.edu.  

The CUNY Prosody Lab is a general phonetics and laboratory phonology lab, featuring facilities for collecting production (acoustic and physiological), perception, and psycholinguistic data. One of the lab's primary research foci is the investigation of speech prosody and intonation, and the lab supports graduate students on various research projects.

Housed by: College of Staten Island

Director: Jason Bishop

For more information, visit the lab website or contact Jason Bishop.

The CUNY Second Language Acquisition Lab is the center for study of language acquisition at the Graduate Center. Its main objective is to conduct cross-linguistic research on the acquisition of non-primary languages in children and adults, comparing it to first language acquisition so as to discover universal characteristics of language development as well as differences between primary and non-primary language acquisition. The SLA lab is both a research and a teaching lab. Students interested in language acquisition have the opportunity to participate in grant-funded research projects and to conduct studies of their own under the supervision of Professor Gita Martohardjono.

Housed by: The Graduate Center (Linguistics Program)

Director: Gita Martohardjono

Spring 2023 meetings are held on Wednesdays 3pm-4pm.

For more information, visit the lab website or contact slal@gc.cuny.edu.

The goal of the Developmental Neurolinguistic Lab is to understand the relationship between language and brain development, and later brain organization, to help explain the nature of developmental language disorders.

Housed by: The Graduate Center (Speech-Language-Hearing Program)

Director: Valerie Shafer

Spring 2023 meetings are held on Wednesdays from 11:15am-12:30pm.

For more information, visit the lab website or contact Valerie Shafer.

At the Developmental Speech Perception Lab, researchers study young children’s earliest speech and language, working to learn about how children learn to listen and understand their first words – and how they learn to use them. Children that come to the lab participate in fun, game-like procedures that provide important information about early language understanding.

Housed by: The Graduate Center (Speech-Language-Hearing Program)

Director: Suzanne van der Feest

Spring meetings are held on Monday mornings from 10:30am-11:30am.

For more information, visit the lab website or contact Suzanne van der Feest.

The Eye-Tracking Laboratory at the College of Staten Island utilizes free-viewing eye-tracking known as the Visual World Paradigm. This experimental technique for studying spoken language comprehension provides a means for examining moment-by-moment processing in a natural setting of listening to speech. By monitoring eye movements of very different groups of participants -- normal adults, typically developing children, bilingual speakers and aphasic patients -- much can be inferred about what's going on when people act out spoken instructions.

Research in the lab focuses on three groups of participants (normal adults, children, and aphasic patients), and two languages, English and Russian."

Housed by: College of Staten Island

Director: Irina A. Sekerina

For more information, please contact Irina A. Sekerina.

In the Language Documentation Lab, researchers are trained to document and analyze their own heritage languages.

Housed by: Queens College

Director: Daniel Kaufman

For more information, visit the lab website.

Research in the Motor Speech Lab at the College of Staten Island focuses primarily on speech disorders in children and adults, and speech development in children. Specifically, researchers use state of the art technology to study movement and coordination in speech produced by children, individuals with Apraxia of Speech, individuals with Parkinson's disease, and typical speakers.

Housed by: College of Staten Island

Director: Christina Hagedorn

For more information, visit the lab website or contact Christina Hagedorn.

The Neurolinguistics Laboratory has as its goal to understand the organization and processing of language in the adult brain. Particular foci of interest are:

1. the language changes associated with aphasia and it's treatment
2. the way agrammatism manifests differently, and similarly, across languages
3. the language changes associated with healthy aging and dementia
4. he way languages are organized in, and utilized by, the brain of the bilingual or polyglot
5. how dyslexics (monoligual or bilingual, young or old) succeed in learning a 'foreign' language

Housed by: The Graduate Center (Speech-Language-Hearing Program)

Director: Loraine Obler

For more information, visit the lab website for details or contact Loraine Obler.

The CUNY Psycholinguistics Lab undertakes experimental studies of human sentence processing, with an emphasis on cross-linguistic research. Its facilities supporting on- and off-site data collection are made available to students and faculty pursuing individual and collaborative projects. Several current projects focus on the syntax-prosody interface.

Housed by: The Graduate Center (Linguistics Program)

Director: Sam Al Khatib 

The QC LVC Lab focuses on modeling language variation and change. The lab’s main recent focus has been on vocalic variation and change in New York City English.

Housed by: Queens College

Directors: Bill Haddican and Michael Newman

For more information, please visit the lab website.

The goals of the Speech Production, Acoustics and Perception Laboratory are to understand the organization of the articulatory underpinnings of linguistic structure, to find the critical components of the acoustics for perceiving speech, and to explore the interrelationship between the two.

Housed by: The Graduate Center (Speech-Language-Hearing Program)

Director: Douglas Whalen

Spring 2023 meetings are held on Tuesdays from 12pm-1:30pm.

For more information, visit the lab website or contact Douglas Whalen.