Research & Facilities
Research
Many research areas are covered by the specialties of the Illinois Linguistics faculty:
- Computational Linguistics
- First and Second Language Acquisition
- Historical Linguistics
- Natural Language Processing
- Phonetics and Phonology
- Psycholinguistics
- Sociolinguistics
- Syntax, Semantics, and Morphology
Within the broader areas, work is being done on many subfields, including:
- Applied Linguistics
- Comparative Linguistics
- Discourse Analysis
- Endangered Languages
- Forensic Phonetics
- Language Documentation
- Phonotactics
- Pragmatics
- Prosody
- Morphology
- Text/Corpus Linguistics
- Typology
- Writing Systems
Facilities
The University of Illinois boasts three recently-updated labs for faculty and student research:
- The Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Lab was opened in Spring 2007 for research on psycholinguistic aspects of second language acquisition. The lab is location in G73 of the basement of the Foreign Languages building. Lab Director: Dr. Silvina Montrul (montrul at illinois.edu)
- The Illinois Phonetics and Phonology Lab was reopened in Fall 2007 with updated recording equipment, computing facilities, and experimental aerodynamics equipment. It is located in the basement of the Foreign Languages Building, room G90. Lab Director: Dr. Ryan Shosted (rshosted at illinois.edu)
- University of Illinois Computational Linguistics Lab is a facility dedicated to research that focuses on a number of areas of natural language and speech processing, as well as more theoretical work on formal models of language. The lab is located in the Beckman Institute. Lab Director: Dr. Richard Sproat (rws at illinois.edu)
- Reading Room
- TESL Library
Use of Human Subjects
Any research involving human subjects is subject to regulation for the protection of the subjects themselves and integrity of the data collected. It is essential for faculty and students conducting this research to ensure that it falls within ethical guideines. Many experiments performed by members of department can be approved through the Linguistic Department's Institutional Review Board (IRB). Other research requiring a greater amount of oversight may also need to go through the University of Illinois IRB.