Faculty and students engage in a spectrum of experimental research that encompasses phonetics, signed languages, psycholinguistics, event-related brain potentials (ERPs), and connectionist modeling. These distinctive properties reflect the faculty's commitment to accurate, cognitively realistic analyses of language structure that are informed by linguistic theories, and make a substantial contribution to their development, but are not confined by the limitations of any particular theoretical formulation.

The department houses laboratories devoted to experimental studies of language with emphasis on phonetics, event-related brain potentials (ERPs), computational linguistics, experimental syntax, and signed languages. The focus of experimental research in the department is the mutual dependence between mechanisms of language processing and theories of phonology and syntax. Linguistics graduate students may supplement their theoretical studies with experimental research; in addition to departmental laboratories, graduate students have access to experimental laboratories concerned with language issues in other departments.

The department's language laboratory maintains a library of written and recorded materials permitting independent study of dozens of languages; it also includes a microcomputer facility for self-instruction in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. The Linguistics Language Program (LLP) provides basic foreign language instruction for the entire campus, and many linguistics graduate students are employed as TAs in the program. Aside from providing a source of funding, the LLP provides graduate students with valuable teaching experience.

There is extensive collaboration among adherents of different approaches, creating an atmosphere in which the mechanical details of theories are not allowed to obscure their substantive results and points of convergence. With its instructional and research program, the department is actively working toward a synthesis of the basic insights and findings of diverse theoretical and experimental perspectives.

This theoretical strength of the department is matched by strength in both language study, particularly fieldwork, and experimental science. The range of languages represented in faculty research encompasses American Sign Language (ASL), Quebec Sign Language (LSQ), Chinese, Finno-Ugric, Germanic, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Niger-Congo, Romance (particularly Spanish), Semitic (particularly Ethiopian/Eritrean), and Slavic. The departmental concern with the empirical facts of language is reflected in a field methods requirement for graduate students as well as in the graduate student language requirement (conversational ability in one language other than English and reading ability in two languages other than English). The department has a tradition of working with native speakers of a wide variety of languages.

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Department of Linguistics :: University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive #108 :: La Jolla, CA 92093-0108
Phone: (858) 534-3600 :: TDD: (858) 822-255 :: Fax: (858) 534-4789
E-mail: linginfo@ling.ucsd.edu :: http://ling.ucsd.edu/