Laboratories
- Romance linguistics laboratory
- Neurolinguistics laboratory
- Psycholinguistics laboratory
- Sound Patterns Laboratory
- Sociolinguistics laboratory
Romance linguistics laboratory
The Romance linguistics laboratory provides training, office space and technical support for students and post-docs working in the area of romance and comparative linguistics, as well as in historical linguistics. The lab has substantial holdings of books, theses, concordances and unpublished papers.
Location: Arts Hall, Room 415
Co-directors: Paul Hirschbühler, Maria Luisa Rivero
Neurolinguistics laboratory
The Neurolinguistics laboratory provides training, office space and support for graduate students and post-docs working in neurolinguistics. In addition to collecting their own data, researchers in neurolinguistics may use our previously collected store of language and neuropsychological data from right- and left-hemisphere stroke patients and from talented, average and extremely poor second-language learners.
The facilities and technical support of the Linguistics Research Laboratory are available to assist in data collection and analysis. Dissertations and ongoing research projects by graduate and post-doctoral fellows in the lab include comprehension and production ability in Persian-speaking agrammatics, the relationship between errors in recalling sentences, processing deficits and reading impairment in children with psychiatric disorders, the syntactic processing abilities of the right cerebral hemisphere, and discourse level processing deficits after a right-hemisphere stroke and in demented patients.
Location: Arts Hall, Room 428
Director: Eta Schneiderman
Psycholinguistics laboratory
The Psycholinguistics laboratory provides training, office space and support for graduate students and post-docs working in psycholinguistics. In addition to the lab's video and audio equipment, available for data collection and analysis, researchers in psycholinguistics have access to the facilities of the Linguistics Research Laboratory.
Recently completed dissertations and ongoing research by graduate and post-doctoral fellows in the lab include studies of adult processing of Serbo-Croatian, the acquisition of long-distance dependencies in Chinese, French and German, the acquisition of pronominal constructions in Greek and Spanish, and the acquisition of temporal connectives in English.
The lab also organizes Psycholinguistic Shorts, an annual daylong conference.
Location: Arts Hall, Rooms 410
Sociolinguistics laboratory
The mandate of the Sociolinguistics laboratory is to further the study of natural speech in social context, with special emphasis on the mechanisms by which language change occurs in different contact situations in Canada and elsewhere. The laboratory provides support and training in the theory and method of variationist sociolinguistics for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, some of who have been involved in related SSHRC-funded projects for several years. The laboratory houses an extensive database of numerous language varieties, accessible and analyzable through extraction and statistical protocols. Other electronic database tools have been developed in the course of analyzing dozens of linguistic variables in previous research. On-site access to these materials, which have served as the basis for scholarly publications and presentations, dissertations, theses, memoirs, comprehensive exams and class papers, is contingent upon compliance with specific ethical and other guidelines.
Sociolinguistics Laboratory holdings include corpora of contemporary language varieties (for example, the Corpus du français parlé à Ottawa-Hull and assorted bilingual databases involving typologically different language pairs), and a number of unique historical corpora (Récits du français québécois d’autrefois, late 19th century, Répertoire de grammaires historiques du français, 1500-1993, Early African American English in the Diapora, 1783-1824, the Ottawa Historical Grammar Resource on Early Variability in English, 1577-1930).
Location: Arts Hall, Rooms 403, 404, 405, 406 and 407
Director: Shana Poplack
Sociolinguistics Lab
Arts Hall, Room 402
Telephone: 613-562-5800, ext. 1184
sociolx@uOttawa.ca