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Who We Are Social Media Facebook YouTube Blog LingUA Founded in 1963, the UC San Diego Department conducts research and offers in-depth instruction in the main areas of linguistics (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics), contributing to both theoretical and empirical/experimental approaches to language, including computational linguistics, fieldwork, language acquisition, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and sign language. We are an active and integral part of the large language community at UC San Diego, together with colleagues in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, anthropology, communication and philosophy. We offer five undergraduate majors , three minors , and a Ph.D. program . Students also have the opportunity to obtain an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and and a graduate Specialization in Anthropogeny. There is active involvement and collaboration among our undergraduate students, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, visitors and faculty in our many research labs and reading groups, as well as through our Undergraduate Association (LingUA) , and our department colloquia . The Department is also the home of the Language Program (LLP) , which offers beginning language instruction in American Sign Language (ASL), Arabic , French , German , Italian , Portuguese , and Spanish . It also houses the Heritage Language Program (HLP), which offers courses in Filipino , Hindi , Korean , Persian , and Vietnamese for heritage language speakers. Department Statements UC San Diego Department policies on bias, harassment, and discrimination Statement on the Presidential decision to end DACA News & Events Matthew Zaslansky's Fulbright research in Georgia Ph.D. student Matthew Zaslansky is currently in Tbilisi, Georgia on a Fulbright grant to study Georgian Sign Language (GESL). The research is carried out in affiliation with Professor Tamar Makharoblidze (Ilia State University). Matthew has been carrying out fieldwork with native signers in order to document certain morphosyntactic features in which GESL differs from the closely related surrounding sign languages in the Caucasus. Congratulations, Matthew! Qi Cheng awarded NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant Graduate student Qi Cheng, a Ph.D candidate in our department and a member of Rachel Mayberry Lab for Multimodal Language Development, was recently awarded a National Science Foundation Program – Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (#1917922) for her dissertation work. Her research examines the biological foundations of human language with a focus on early language experience, linking observations from language learning, processing, and the brain network. Congratulations, Qi! Alumna Kate Davidson Receives NSF Career Award We are very proud to share the great news that our alumna Kate Davidson (Ph.D. 2011) has received a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (NSF CAREER) Award. Kate, who is currently an assistant professor in linguistics and the director of the Meaning & Modality Laboratory at Harvard University, will be using the five-year $500,000 award to develop several large projects on experimental pragmatics and semantics in visual language in her lab and in the broader community. Congratulations, Kate! (Photo © Brown Dog Studio) Emily Davis is working on language evolution at the University of Edinburgh Graduate student Emily Davis is spending her 2019-20 academic year at the Center for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh to work with Prof. Kenny Smith and Prof. Simon Kirby on iterated learning— the study of how sequences, linguistic or otherwise, change through repeated learning. Her year in Edinburgh is supported by a CARTA Fellowship. Nina Semushina awarded NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant Nina Semushina, a PhD candidate and graduate student in Prof. Mayberry's lab. was recently awarded a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (Ling-DDRI) for the project "The development of numerical cognition and linguistic number use: Insights from sign languages". The goal of the project is to study the effects of language deprivation on the acquisition of numeracy and linguistic number use in American sign language, taking into account some modality-specific properties of numeral systems and plural morphology in sign languages. Congratulations, Nina! Ray Incamu Huaute receives two Awards and a Fellowship Our graduate student Ray Incamu Huaute was awarded a Scholarship Award as part of the Native American Heritage Month Celebration Kickoff event at UC San Diego on November 4, 2019 for his academic achievements to support equity, diversity and inclusion at UC San Diego. He was also awarded an Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) fellowship (2019-2020) and an Endangered Language Fund/IPA Language Legacies Award (2019-2021) for his project Expanding the Documentation and Description of Cahuilla. Congratulations, Ray! Congratulations to Anne Therese Frederiksen Ling grad student Anne Therese Frederiksen has accepted a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Irvine, to work with Judith Kroll on pronoun processing in bimodal bilinguals. Congratulations, Anne Therese! Tory Sampson is awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Our graduate student Tory Sampson has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for 2019-2022 to pursue her project on "Pronominal Acquisition of ASL in Deaf Children". This project will explore pronoun acquisition in signing deaf children and analyze how they distinguish between deictic and pronominal pointing in ASL. The acquisition of pointing and pronouns in deaf children will be compared to that of hearing children using spoken language. Congratulations, Tory! Adam McCollum has accepted a tenure-track position at Rutgers Our 4th year graduate student Adam McCollum has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Phonology in the Department of at Rutgers University. Adam's research is based on fieldwork, formal and computational methods and laboratory phonology. His (soon-to-be-completed) dissertation is examining gradient vowel harmony patterns in several Turkic languages. Congratulations, Adam! Congratulations to Hope Morgan! Congratulations to Hope Morgan (PhD 2017) who has been awarded a post-doctoral fellow position by the Marie Curie COFUND LEaDing Fellows Programme. Hope will be working with Dr. Victoria Nyst at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Hope's dissertation on Kenyan Sign Language has also been accepted for publication in the de Gruyter Sign Language Typology book series, and will appear in 2020. Congratulations to Matthew Zaslansky! Matthew Zaslansky has been awarded a prestigious Fulbright fellowship in linguistics for the 2019-2020 academic year. Beginning in Septem...