Maryland Wins NSF Training Grant for Language Research

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- The University of Maryland has received National Science Foundation (NSF) funding for its first ever Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program (IGERT). Maryland's new IGERT grant is the first ever awarded to a program based in linguistics.

The $3 million grant was awarded to the university's new Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity program, an innovative, new interdisciplinary program that will train young scientists and engineers to understand language diversity by combining the tools of behavioral, computational and biological research. NSF gives the highly competitive IGERT awards only to programs dedicated to highly interdisciplinary research. This year out of some 500 applicant teams from around the nation, only 20 received awards.

University Psychology Professor Amanda Woodward, Director of the Maryland Infant Studies Laboratory, with an infant study participant.

Maryland's new graduate training and research program is based in the linguistics department but draws upon an extensive collaborative network that incorporates researchers from nine other university departments and programs (neuroscience and cognitive science, psychology, biology, hearing and speech sciences, second language acquisition, computer science, electrical engineering, and philosophy), the National Institutes of Health and the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language, a partnership between the university and several federal agencies and departments. The project also will partner with an NSF-supported Science of Learning Center based at Gallaudet University that focuses on visual language.

"In order to go after the big challenges that we face in language science, researchers in this field have to be able to put together all the disparate pieces of the puzzle of how people learn and use language," said linguistics professor Colin Phillips, principal investigator and coordinator of the new IGERT program.

Phillips explained that the new IGERT graduate program draws on an existing framework of interdisciplinary research already in place at the University of Maryland . The Department of Linguistics and the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science program are at the center of this network of connections. Together with the departments of hearing and speech science, computer science, second language acquisition, psychology, philosophy, electrical and computer engineering, biology, and the iSchool they have created one of the largest and best integrated language research communities in the world. "Other institutions also have some excellent programs in language, but few if any have an interdisciplinary community that fosters such close collaboration and integrated study in the way the University of Maryland 's does," he said.

UM linguistics graduate student Annie Gagliardi (pictured here with children in a villiage in Dagestan, Russia) is one of the first cohort of graduate students to receive a competitive fellowship under Maryland's new IGERT program.

Click here to read more about Annie, her researcd and her visit to Dagestan to study a rare language.

The new IGERT grant will provide funding for initiatives that foster additional cooperation between the university departments involved in language research. This will include new coursework, multidisciplinary research projects, and interdepartmental graduate seminars. A central feature of the program is a two-week intensive boot camp known as the 'Winter Storm', to be held each January.

In addition, the IGERT grant will enable the university to extend its already extensive language research efforts to new institutions. The graduate training and research partnership with nearby Gallaudet University in Washington DC will incorporate the study of visual language into the university's program and allow Gallaudet graduate students to engage in the research training. Similarly, collaborations with institutions in Japan, India and Brazil will add to the diversity of the languages studied and help promote a model of interdisciplinary research worldwide.

"We want people working together on these international partnerships because you can't understand language unless you attack the problem using many different languages," says Phillips. "English and Spanish just won't cut it. This is not the sort of problem we could ever solve just by just having big science here, it's got to be the sort of thing that the whole world is equipped to do."

Language at Maryland

The University of Maryland has made intensive research in language science and innovative instruction in critical foreign languages an institutional priority . As part of this long-term commitment, the university has created and continues to create research centers investigating the nation's foreign language needs using a broad, interdisciplinary approach. These centers include: the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language and the National Foreign Language Center .

Maryland has also launched national model language education programs that stress high-level proficiency in the acquisition of critical languages such as Chinese, Arabic and Persian ( Iran ) through the School of Languages , Literatures, and Cultures and centers such as the Confucius Institute, the Center for Persian Studies and the Center for East Asia Studies .

President C. D. Mote, Jr. has written that "at the University of Maryland , new research to better understand language-how a second language is learned; how the human brain perceives language; how to quickly translate foreign languages using new technologies-is at the forefront of scientific discovery by our faculty."

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