Anybody Interested in Language Acquisition?

[skatering]

Hi everyone. I've been lurking here for a while, but this is my first post. I have a BA in English (Language and Literature) and an MA Linguistics in progress. I did a small amount of language acquisition in my undergrad, which I really enjoyed, so it's likely to be the topic of my MA dissertation this year. But, I don't think I've ever seen anybody on here say it was their research interest. Is it not particularly common, or is this often covered under one of the thereotical subheadings, such as syntax?

 

Also, I'll be looking at applying for a PhD in 2016 (ideally in the US) and many of the usual PhD Linguistics programmes list language acquisition as a research area. But I've also found some universities cover this area in a different department, leading to different awards (PhD Education, or PhD Educational Linguistics, etc). Any tips for places I should research which cover the topic but don't label it as theoretical/experimental linguistics? It's child/first language acquisition I'm interested in (possibly veering into clinical, such as SLI) so I don't want to get too close to pedagogy or second language acquisition.

[isilya]

My field, psycholinguistics, is pretty similar. You can be interested in the psycholinguistics of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonetics, etc. In the same way, you can be interested in the acquisition of syntax, semantics, etc. I'm not very familiar with acquisition, but in psycholinguistics at least, a lot of times you will see faculty in psych or cog sci departments instead of linguistics. In fact, I'm only applying to 3 ling programs because my POIs at other schools happened to be in different departments. So I would look at some psych/cog sci programs. For example, Rochester Brain & Cognitive Sciences is FULL of acquisition people - Elissa Newport, Dick Aslin, some new asst profs (like Celeste Kidd & Steve Piantadosi). Good luck program shopping!!

[wuglife427]

For example, Rochester Brain & Cognitive Sciences is FULL of acquisition people - Elissa Newport, Dick Aslin, some new asst profs (like Celeste Kidd & Steve Piantadosi). Good luck program shopping!!

 

Elissa Newport is actually at Georgetown now :/

 

Anyway, skatering--following from what isilya said, I would suggest looking at programs that encourage interdisciplinary work, especially with psych/cog sci departments. Look at the University of Maryland or the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Good luck!!

Edited January 2, 2015 by wuglife427

[Garyon]

Hi!

I am pretty interested in language acquisition and language pathologies too, even if mostly as a way to acquire insights on more theoretical-oriented issues (eg. new syntactic properties, language processing and complexity etc).

 

As wuglife said, Maryland and Umass@Amherst have great experimetal labs that you should definitely check out.

At UMD in particular, there is close collaboration within the Language Science community and especially with the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science. I find  also prof. Feldman's work there especially intriguing (but it is a bit more computational oriented, so I'm not sure it is what you are looking for).

Also, take a look at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at Upenn.

[cw01]

I'm applying to study acquisition! I would say most language acquisition programs are under the psychology department, particularly developmental psychology (language development). And a lot of people doing cognitive development would also have their hands in language acquisition as well! 

Other than that, as mentioned in the previous posts, language acquisition could also be in the cognitive sciences program. I have also found some ling programs that do acquisition as well! 

Good luck!