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advil

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    Baltimore, MD
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    Cognitive Science, linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, computational modeling
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  1. FYI one of the people there who I'm guessing taught some of these courses is moving to UCLA this fall.
  2. Oh, and if you are in a union, definitely get in touch -- even if they can't help directly, they may have other incidents that they know of, and will probably have the resources to know the structure of things at your university, who to talk to, etc.
  3. I actually do think this behavior (as described) is somewhat discriminatory (not intending any legal claims) and if this happened in the department where I am DGS I would put a stop to it. However, I can't guarantee that academic authority figures would be this reasonable in general. Basically as I see it your (again, self-described) language abilities are being policed on the basis of your ethnicity, independent of facts that should establish you as a native speaker beyond doubt. I think you are right to be upset by it. However, I agree with fuzzylogician that you sound very upset in your writing, and I would try to eliminate all trace of emotion in your communication with authority figures; this may well be impacting your speaking/writing ability independent of native language. _If_ your chair is somewhat sympathetic and you haven't already done this, you should convey in a neutral calm fashion that you believe this is happening on the basis of your ethnicity and nothing else. The wording in an email might be something like as follows, which I've attempted to make unemotional but still strongly worded: "I'm perplexed at the situation and don't know what to do. I grew up in the US, went to a US high school, and a US university, and am a native speaker of English. As a linguist in training, I think I have some confidence in what this entails. The only reason I can see that I would be singled out as an alleged L2 speaker is my ethnicity." If you use the term ESL instead, I would expand it rather than use the acronym out so that the phrase "second language" is visible. I don't know that this is a battle you will win, unfortunately, because the chair may have to play unpleasant politics if they are inclined to do something, and may not perceive it as worth it for an MA student they don't know (harsh, but possible). If you have a DGS in your department, you could try them first, this would be more following the academic "chain of command". You should also be aware going forward that there are studies showing that students in classroom settings with Asian teachers (and probably other visible non-white ethnicities, but I've only seen studies with Asian teachers) show strong unconscious biases in their evaluation of accents regardless of the objective presence of these accents. So I'm guessing you are Asian (or hispanic for an outside chance) because this sort of racism is not unknown.
  4. Ah, I misunderstood completely, sorry about that, I think I was primed by the use of "UG" in the original post. We do look for undergraduate degrees in areas of cognitive science or in formal/quantitative fields, but language degrees and communication (in principle) can count for the former, and have. We also accept post-bac experience in related areas as well, so an MA in applied linguistics would count for that (again in principle, but the way they described their masters work sounds definitely in the right direction), or other things like lab manager / RA experience. I can't comment on particular applications (and I haven't tried to line this description up with one at all) but it's pretty clear to me that a pitfall the OP hit here is "cognitive linguistics" more than the undergraduate degree. The reason I say "in principle" is that for backgrounds outside the obvious ones the details may matter a lot, and there definitely has to be some evidence of some kind that such applicants would really know what they're getting into, but feel free to ask a followup question if you want.
  5. This is a bit belated, but as a linguist (faculty) at JHU I wanted to attempt to clear up any confusion about linguistics at JHU. I'm not entirely sure what a "UG degree" is, but it is true that all of the linguistics research at JHU is strongly in the generative / formal linguistics camp, including Legendre's and Smolensky's research, and there is substantial interest in language variation and explanations for it. Our students do not tend to closely resemble linguistics researchers that I would describe as "UG" people, though. When evaluating a program for fit it is always helpful to look at the alumni page to get a sense for what students might do. For more information on linguistics research, this page might be helpful. JHU CogSci would not be an appropriate place to do cognitive linguistics (and cognitive linguistics has very little to do with cognitive science); I agree with fuzzylogician's assessment of the fit issue for the schools in the OP. Edit: I would add to the OP, though, that's it's not obvious from your description of what you want to do that it would in fact be cognitive linguistics, which has very specific meaning and connotations. So it might be worth assessing what you really mean "cognitive linguistics" or you really mean linguistics/language research in a cognitive science context -- the latter will open a lot more doors.
  6. FYI it has always been like this (i.e. it is not a function of the present economic climate) -- at the UCs in general it is very difficult/expensive to fund international students. Their visiting event for accepted students is yesterday/today, sorry...
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