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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:
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)
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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