Research on endangered and under-described languages is a comparative research on the diversity and uniformity of the languages of the world. This is an area of special initiative at the NSF, NEH and other agencies. Two NSF funded projects are underway at present, one on the Malay spoken in Jambi Province in Sumatra, and the second on the Algonquian language, Passamaquoddy, spoken in Maine and New Brunswick. A major focus of the linguistics program at the University of Delaware is the study of a wide range of typologically different languages. Which features of human languages are common to all languages, and which features vary across languages? Answers to these questions are central to an understanding of the human capacity for language. This research is carried out in the context of precise linguistic theory, and students and faculty alike have been very successful in publishing their work in the leading journals in linguistics. This work combines with the department's other main focus on Linguistics in Cognitive Science to provide a powerful interdisciplinary approach to the study of language. Training in cross-linguistic research plays a central role in the graduate program - courses in linguistic theory include extensive preparation in the skills needed to do research on less well-studied languages. The faculty and students in the program provide an unusually broad array of cross-linguistic expertise.

Jambi Malay
Principal UD investigator: Gabriella Hermon and Peter Cole

Passamaquoddy
Principal investigator: Ben Bruening

Language Acquisition is one of the central topics in cognitive science. Experimental research is focused on first and second language acquisition in infants, children, and adults, language processing in adults and children, and the neural and genetic bases of language and its relation to other mental processes. An area of special strength is first language acquisition. This group is genuinely interdepartmental, including faculty from the departments of Linguistics and Psychology, and from the School of Education. Agencies funding this research have included NIH and NSF.

Language and Cognition lab
Principal investigator: Anna Papafragou

Acquisition of Jakarta Indonesian
Principal UD investigators: Gabriella Hermon and Peter Cole

Infant Language Project
Principal investigator: Roberta Golinkoff

The unfortunate tendency in the field of linguistics has been that sounds, structure and meanings, and their processing are investigated separately by the researchers in each subfield of linguistics, and their findings are rarely integrated in a systematic way. Involving close collaboration by the researchers with different expertise, this project has great potential to initiate a step toward more productive integration of the subfields of linguistics.

Wh-interrogatives at the Prosody-Syntax-Pragmatics Crossroad
Principal UD investigator: Satoshi Tomioka

The Experimental Psycholinguistics laboratory examines the millisecond-by-millisecond incremental representation building that the mind/brain performs in response to language stimuli. Questions include:

• What are the components of the human language processing system?
• What is the relative timing of these components' activity during linguistic representation building?
• What can parsing tell us about grammar?
• How do the language processing mechanisms develop in children?
• How does this development interact with children's induction of grammatical rules?
• Do language impaired children process language differently and is this the source of their acquisition impairment?

Experimental Psycholinguistics Laboratory
Principal investigator: Arild Hestvik

Is it possible to develop such an intimate understanding of natural language that we can one day program a robot whose language abilities develop, in every circumstance, like a human infant's? In this
research we develop computational models of aspects of natural language and of the language-learning process. This research thus forms the intersection of linguistics and theoretical computer science. On the linguistics side, we draw from insights gained from theoretical syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology, and phonetics. On the computer science side, we draw from insights in formal language theory, formal learning theory, and grammatical inference. Current projects include:

Phonology and phonetics lab
Principal investigator: Jeffrey Heinz

Many of our faculty are interested in applying insights from the cognitive sciences to every day issues. Cognitive scientists in the School of Education focus on finding the most effective way to deliver instruction and encourage learning. The faculty involved at the Applied Science and Engineering Laboratories are concerned with helping those with cognitive disabilities. Funding has come from NSF, NIH, DOE, and other sources particular to education.

Applied Science and Engineering Laboratories
Principal investigator: Tim Bunnell

Children's Math Project
Principal investigator: Nancy Jordan

This group, consisting primarily of faculty members in the Department of Computer and Information Science, is composed of faculty working in natural language processing and computational linguistics, including applications involving interaction with graphical information, knowledge representation, and natural language generation to aid the disabled. It also has a faculty member working on visual and spatial perception especially for mobile robots and one interested in computer graphical, real-time tracking of the human tongue during speech. Furthermore, there is a faculty member researching artificially intelligent agents which search the Web and these interests include applications of social psychology. There is a faculty member interested in formal grammars for natural languages. Lastly, there is a faculty member working on various theoretical/mathematical areas of computer science, including with applications for self-reflecting machines, machines which learn, and inductive inference machines. These three topics provide theorems and insights re cognitive science, including linguistics, and the last one, additionally, theorems and insights for philosophy of science.

There are clear connections between the computational group and the psychologists interested in spatial relations (on the one hand) and the linguists concerned with the structure and development of human language (on the other hand). The program hopes in the future to initiate new opportunities for interaction among these groups.

Speech Research Lab
Principal investigator: Tim Bunnell

Video and Image Modeling and Sythesis Lab
Principal investigator: Chandra Kambhamettu

Artificial Intelligence Program

Natural Language Processing Program

The cognitive psychology group of the Department of Psychology focuses its research around the topic of Spatial Cognition, using a variety of measures to approach this area of study. These include behavioral studies, ERP studies (neuroimaging), eye tracking, and computational modeling. Research is done with various populations of people (adults, infants, children with Williams Syndrome), sometimes including with those from other cultures. Although the core faculty members have expertise in different areas, their overlapping interests in spatial cognition have resulted in several collaborative relationships among members of different labs. This group includes researchers in Education as well as Psychology, and has included graduate students in Psychology, Linguistics and Education. Faculty research has attracted funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Visual Cognition Lab
Principal investigator: James Hoffman

Spatial Cognition Lab
Principal investigator: Helene Intraub

• Anthropology
• Computer and Information Science
• Education
• Linguistics
• Neuroscience Program
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Speech Lab