Vol. 19, No. 27 |
April 13, 2000 |
Linguistics prof recognized for research and teaching
 Colin Phillips, linguistics, has received a $268,000, four-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award for his research into the real-time processes that allow people to effortlessly understand language.
The NSF award includes a strong teaching component that will support the development of graduate and undergraduate courses. "This will help us to continue to expand our lab-based courses so students can get more practice in active learning and hands-on experimentation," Phillips said. For example, this fall Phillips' "Introduction to Linguistics" course (LING 101) will form part of a new freshman cluster of courses in "Language and Mind," combining the study of linguistics with psychology and English. The award also will provide valuable support for the Psycholinguistics Laboratory, consisting of Phillips and eight graduate and undergraduate students. Students working in the lab are involved in research into language comprehension, linguistic theory, language acquisition and language processing. In this phase of his research, Phillips said he and his students will try to map the process that occurs in the brain when people are understanding language. As people listen to language, their brains are rapidly and unconsciously performing many different processes at once. "A lot of comprehension happens well before you hear the end of a sentence," Phillips said. "What people do when they listen is comprehend what's being said before the speaker completes his sentence," he said. The project will try to put into real-time terms what is taking place in the brain to allow that pre-comprehension. "At the linguistics level, we have an understanding of the structure of language," Phillips said, "but less is known about how language structure relates to real-time processes in the mind/brain." Phillips and his students will study these processes in a series of experiments on sentence reading. In some of the experiments, they will measure how long it takes to read each word of a sentence. In other experiments, they will measure brain waves associated with understanding language. Since brain waves are the result of a fluctuation of voltage between parts of the brain, language understanding displays a very specific pattern of waves. The final step would be to document these patterns. When the results are in, Phillips said, they should have a model of the steps that people go through in turning words and sentences into meanings. Although the focus of the research is on English, the project also will also include studies of languages with other word orders, such as Turkish. Phillips received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1996 and worked as a postdoctoral associate on the Mind Articulation Project in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT before joining UD's Department of Linguistics faculty in 1997. –Barbara Garrison |