Linguistics

Learn how language works and how it is used, developed, and preserved over time. With basic and advanced training covering core areas of linguistics in addition to fieldwork, you can prepare for a career in academia, teaching, publishing, national security, international affairs, policy, forensics, medicine, technology, and more. A significant number of our students have gone on to pursue graduate studies in formal linguistics in top departments around the country.

CLASSES YOU MIGHT TAKE

Language and Advertising

This class uses tools from linguistics and cognitive science to analyze and understand the impact of advertising on its viewers. We’ll treat ads as communicative acts and explore the consequences and questions such as what can theories of communication (from linguistics, psychology, and philosophy) tell us about ads? How do ads use central features of human cognition to accomplish their aims? Do ads manipulate, and if so, how successfully?

Lost in Space: How Humans Learn, Think, and Talk About the World Around Us

The ability to perceive, navigate, and explain space around us is essential in our everyday life. This course will attempt to answer questions like how does the human mind structure the space around us and recognize the spatial relations between various objects? What happens when this ability is impaired? We’ll give an overview of spatial cognition from multiple perspectives and draw analogies between different research paradigms.

Natural Language Processing

This course surveys the difficulties of working with written language data, fundamental techniques used in processing natural language, and the core applications of NLP technology. We emphasize a practical approach in this course, so you’ll write programs and use open source toolkits to solve a variety of problems.

Faculty Spotlight

PROF. BRENDA RAPP

Professor, Department of Cognitive Science

Hand-Writing Letters Shown To Be Best Technique for Learning To Read

Rapp and lead author Robert Wiley, a former Johns Hopkins University PhD student, conducted an experiment in which 42 people were taught the Arabic alphabet, split into three groups of learners: writers, typers, and video watchers.

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