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Current
Research Projects
The Montclair State Linguistics Department faculty
are all actively engaged in research. Funded research currently
supports four undergraduate students and five graduate students. Most
of the research projects also provide valuable opportunities for
hands-on work in applied linguistics.
The specific projects include:
American Sign Language Second
Language Acquisition (ASL L2A)
In
becoming a highly proficient L2 user, the expectation would be to not
only master the more frozen forms of the new language, and also master
the productive structures of any given language. These individuals
should be able to demonstrate the ability to weigh the various factors
that contribute to use of more complex, novel, and variable forms of
the target language, which are shown in native language communities.
This study ultimately assesses the capabilities of L2 ASL signers based
on this type of mastery.
Contact: Marie Nadolske
(nadolskemATmail.montclair.edu)
An Arabic Interlanguage Database and its Application
(ARIDA)
We
are building an electronic collection (corpus) of written learner
productions which will become the basis for studying the acquisition of
Arabic as a second/foreign language and for developing new
instructional and testing materials. The corpus will be annotated for
several linguistic features like part-of-speech as well as for error.
Additionally, we are developing software for corpus searching to
facilitate SLA research and to
provide capabilities for generating instructional materials targeted to
a particular teaching methodology, linguistic skill, learner language
level, or learning style.
Contact:
Eileen Fitzpatrick (fitzpatrickeATmail.montclair.edu)
Ghazi Abuhakema (abuhakemagATmail.montclair.edu)
Anna Feldman (feldmanaATmail.montclair.edu)
Contrastive Academic Cultures
A contrastive
examination of differences that may exist in academic cultures. Data
are collected during interviews with international students and with
MSU professors and analyzed with the goal of creating materials that
will help international students integrate more smoothly into Montclair's
academic community.
Contact: Mary Call (callmATmail.montclair.edu)
Corpus use in language arts
teaching
Examination of the use of language corpora in the teaching of English
grammar.
Contact: Susana Sotillo (sotillosATmail.montclair.edu)
Deception detection
Development of a novel approach for the application of natural language
processing and prosodic analysis to the recognition of deceptive
statements. Joint work with Deception Detection
Technologies. Funded.
Contact: Eileen Fitzpatrick (fitzpatrickeATmail.montclair.edu)
Gender studies terminology
The term gender is increasingly replacing the word sex in public
discourse (and in the media); in theory this is not the case in
sociolinguistics and language and gender research but a preliminary
analysis suggests that in practice, a similar phenomenon is occurring.
This project involves a thorough investigation of the use of these
terms.
Contact: Alice
Freed (freedaATmail.montclair.edu)
MELD
The project collects English text written by English as a Second Language (ESL) students. It stores
the text online, collects data on the student writers that is relevant
to their second language skills, annotates the text to permit retrieval
of usage information and analysis of errors.
Contact: Eileen Fitzpatrick (fitzpatrickeATmail.montclair.edu)
Portable Language Technology
The focus of
this research is on the portability of technology to new languages and
on rapid language technology development. This research takes a novel
approach to rapid, low-cost development of taggers by exploring the
possibility of taking existing resources for one language and applying
them to another, related language. Languages that are either related by
common heritage (e.g., Czech and Russian) or by "contact" (e.g.,
Bulgarian and Greek) often share a number of exploitable properties:
morphological systems, word order, and vocabulary.
Contact: Anna Feldman (feldmanaATmail.montclair.edu)
Funded
Questions in Institutional
Discourse
The research investigates the use of questions in institutional
discourse (and in other sorts of fixed or partially scripted discourse)
the role that questioning plays in (a.) constituting the institutional
context itself and (b.) constructing and/or co-constructing participant
roles and identities for speakers in these contexts.
A book related to the research is
currently under contract with Oxford University Press. Entitled “Why Do
You Ask?: The Function of Questions in
Institutional Discourse”, it is being co-edited with Susan Ehrlich,
Ph.D., Professor of Linguistics at York University.
Toronto.
Contact: Alice
Freed (freedaATmail.montclair.edu)
Sentence processing
We are conducting on-line sentence processing experiments to
investigate the role of various properties of verbs on sentence
comprehension. We are particularly interested in the roles of
transitivity and telicity, and our experiments are intended to
determine the point in the comprehension of a sentence at which verb
properties come into play -- whether at the moment that the verb is
encountered or at a later point when a syntactic or semantic structure
is assigned to a phrase or sentence. The broader significance of this
research is that it attempts to determine which properties of sentences
are based on the lexical characteristics of individual words, and which
are the result of a higher level of syntactic and semantic processing.
Contact: Mary Call (callmATmail.montclair.edu)
WebCam Language Tutoring
This project collected second language learners' written and spoken
language obtained via Yahoo Instant Messenger. Both chat transcripts
and spoken data will be analyzed in order to determine whether students
have opportunities to develop their second language grammar and lexicon
with the help of native speakers of English or advanced learners of
English. Textual data is stored online and will be analyzed using MonConc. The audiotaped
data is being transcribed and saved as plain text in order to be
processed and analyzed. We expect to identify and tag specific
types of learner errors.
Contact: Susana Sotillo (sotillosATmail.montclair.edu)
Recently
Completed Research
Arabic-English medical lexicon
Construction of an Arabic-English medical lexicon for use in a machine
translation system. The project has developed an
ontology of terms necessary for doctor-patient interaction and
is providing several thousand terms in both languages for MT. Funded.
Speech segmentation
Phonetic segmentation of speech and annotation of prosodic features.
Funded.
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