About CRL
Mission Statement
The Center for Research in Language emphasizes the combination of theoretical and experimental approaches to language study. The main role of the Center is to coordinate research on language at UCSD. The Center brings together members of various scholarly communities whose work includes language learning (spoken and signed), language disorders, literacy between deaf mothers and children, and neuroimaging of language. The Center builds upon UCSD's strengths in neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, and psychology, with internationally-renowned faculty who interact across their home departments. The director is Cognitive Science Professor Marta Kutas. Previous directors include Ed Klima, Jeff Elman, Elizabeth Bates and Masha Polinsky.
The Center offers pre- and postdoctoral training opportunities to students and researchers who are interested in language acquisition and decline, psycholinguistics, neuroimaging of language, sign languages and gesture, and computational models of language.
The Center's facilities, designed to accommodate laboratory research projects by the faculty and graduate students, include high-performance work stations, a flexible open laboratory, extensive equipment for audio recording and analysis, and equipment for psycholinguistic experimentation. The open-lab design promotes effective training of graduate students and helps researchers acquire new experimental methodologies.
Overview
CRL brings together faculty, students and research associates who share an interest in the nature of language, its emergence, its development, its change, the processes by which it is acquired and used, and its mediation by the human brain. Housed in the Cognitive Science Building and the AP&M prime annex (the developmental laboratories), CRL is comprised of an interdisciplinary academic staff of specialists in cognitive science, communication, communication disorders, computer science, developmental psychology, theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics, neurosciences, sign, gesture, pediatrics, and radiology. Funding for CRL projects comes from a variety of sources, including the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.
Because language is a phenomenon of great interest to scholars in a wide range of traditional disciplines, CRL attempts to provide a common meeting ground where researchers, faculty, and students from these many areas may come together.
CRL serves as an administrative home to research contracts and grants. Its staff assists principle investigators in identifying appropriate sources of extramural funds, in preparing research proposals, and administering successful grants (maintaining financial records, supervising expenditures, and overseeing academic and staff research personnel records).
CRL provides interdisciplinary training to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. All students have free access to the center’s laboratory and computer facilities (hardware and software) and receive training from their own mentors, their peers in shared labs, as well as from the technical support staff at CRL. Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows conduct their own research projects and/or collaborate in other research projects. They also have a forum for talking about their ideas and findings (CRL weekly talk series). At these weekly meetings, trainees have the opportunity to practice upcoming talks and receive invaluable multidisciplinary feedback. Graduates and postdoctoral researchers also compete for yearly research fellowships (6 predoctoral and 2 postdoctoral) provided by the CRL training grant funded by NIDCD.
CRL administers the UCSD-SDSU joint doctoral program in Language and Communicative Disorders. This interdisciplinary program applies techniques developed in cognitive science and neuroscience to the study of language and language disorders. Specific research focuses are typical and atypical language acquisition and development, sign languages, bilingualism and the neural bases of language use and language loss. This JDP, started in 1996, has produced 16 Ph.D. graduates.
In addition to the Tuesday talks, in recent years CRL has hosted some special talks or workshops related to language that are of interest to people beyond CRL. These include a workshop on speech recognition taught by Bill Byrne of Google; and two sessions with an Aphasic patient interviewed by Nina Dronkers. These were open to the public. CRL organized a meeting of Linguists, headed by Masha Polinsky, to discuss the comparative grammar of Austronesian languages. The biggest event that CRL hosted was the 2007 CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing, of which approx. 300 people attended.
Physical Facilities and Space
The Center for Research in Language occupies 84 rooms and 8,770 square feet of space in two buildings on the UCSD campus: Cognitive Science Building and Applied Physics and Mathematics.
Buildings: |
2 |
|
Assigned Area: |
8,770 SF |
|
Average Room: |
104 SF |
| Room Use Name | Spaces | Area | ||
| Research laboratory / testing rooms | 22 | 1,553 | ||
| Research lab service | 10 | 1,241 | ||
| Research office | 17 | 2,249 | ||
| Research office service | 3 | 281 | ||
| Academic office | 2 | 270 | ||
| Administrative office | 5 | 720 | ||
| Office service | 3 | 196 | ||
| Conference room | 2 | 825 | ||
| 65 | 7,335 |
Academic and Public Service
A. FACULTY MEMBERSHIP
| Cognitive Science: | John Batali | 1993 - present |
| Richard Belew | 1993 - present | |
| Aaron Cicourel | 1993 - present | |
| Seana Coulson | 1999 - present | |
| Gedeon Deak | 1999 - present | |
| Jeffrey L. Elman | 1977 - present | |
| Gilles Fauconnier | 1993 - present | |
| David Kirsh | 1993 - present | |
| Marta Kutas | 1993 - present | |
| Joan Stiles | 1982 - present | |
| Martin Sereno | 1993 - present | |
| Linguistics: | Farrell Ackerman | 1988 - present |
| Robert Kluender | 1993 - present | |
| Ronald W. Langacker | 1970 - present | |
| Rachel Mayberry | 2005 - present | |
| David M. Perlmutter | 1977 - present | |
| Maria Polinksy | 1997 - present | |
| Sanford A. Schane | 1970 - present | |
| Neurosciences: | Angela Ballantyne | 1998 - present |
| Mark Kritchevsky | 1996 - 2004 | |
| Jeanne Townsend | 1998 - present | |
| Doris Trauner | 1990 - present | |
| Psychology: | Mark Appelbaum | 1996 - present |
| Leslie Carver | 2001 - present | |
| Vic Ferreira | 1997 - present | |
| Computer Science & Eng.: | Garrison Cottrell | 1985 - present |
| Communication: | Carol Padden | 1996 - present |
| CRL Research Appointments: | Adele Abrahamson, Associate Project Scientist | |
| Rita Ceponiene, Assistant Project Scientist | ||
| Fred Dick, Assistant Research Scientist | ||
| Nina Dronkers, Research Scientist | ||
| Judy Reilly, Research Scientist (joint with Center for Human Devlopment) | ||
| Donna Thal, Research Scientist | ||
| Beverly Wulfeck, Research Scientist |
In addition, CRL enjoys faculty participation from several other institutions.
| San Diego State University | Larry Fenson |
| Judith Reilly | |
| Lew Shapiro | |
| The Salk Institute | Ursula Bellugi |
| Karen Emmorey | |
| Carnegie-Mellon University | Brian MacWhinney |
| Jay McClelland | |
| University of Washington | Philip Dale |
| Yale University | Stephen Reznick |
| University of Wisconsin, Madison | Virginia Marchman |
| National Chung-Cheng University, Taiwan, ROC | Ovid Tzeng |
| University of Rome | Antonella Devescovi |
| (and Clinica Santa Lucia) | Luigi Pizzamiglio |
| National Council of Research Institute of Psychology, Rome | Virginia Volterra |
| Cristina Caselli | |
| University of Oregon | Helen Neville |
| New York University | Ruth Nass |
| VA Medical Center, La Jolla, CA | Lynn Holland |
| California State University, Long Beach | Lynn Snyder |
| Moscow State University | Tatiana Akhutina |
| Andrew Kurgansky | |
| VA Medical Center, Martinez, CA | Nina Dronkers |
| Max-Planck Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, Leipzig, Germany | Angela Friederici |
| New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria | Boicho Kokinov
Encho Gerganov Ludmil Mavlov Elena Andonova |
B. SEMINAR, LECTURE AND CONFERENCE PROGRAMS
A weekly seminar series entitled Parallel Distributed Processing and Natural Language Processing (PDPNLP) is also sponsored by CRL, with presentations on a wide range of topics on language development and language processing in human beings and neural networks.
A workshop on children with focal brain injury was hosted by CRL in July, 1992 and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Thirty seven participants plus workshop guests participated, many from abroad. The major purpose of the workshop was to provide a forum in which investigators discussed the major issues most central to the question of understanding development in the focal lesion population and to reach agreement on common definitional criteria.
CRL hosted the 33rd Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting, November 5-7, 1995. (The Program is attached.) 225 scientists and researchers from around the globe (England, Italy, eastern United States, China, Japan, India, Israel and Australia) attended the meeting in order to share their current work in platform sessions, a symposium, poster sessions, informal discussion and collaboration. Some topics discussed were: word class phenomena, localization and imaging, primary progressive aphasia, syntax and morpho-syntax, and phonology and lexicon. The meeting provided a showcase for the scientists of UCSD and the work in brain and language being performed at The Center for Research in Language. UCSD graduate and undergraduate students had the rare opportunity to attend this high level research meeting and interact with scientists at the top of their field. As 1995 Chair of the Academy, Dr. Bates organized the meeting and program events.
Faculty and staff involved in the Project in Cognitive and Neural Development meet every Monday to discuss the research on the two NIH projects. PCND also hosts a monthly scientific presentation which consists of speakers from the fields of child and human development, communication disorders and language processing. Notice of this presentation is widely distributed to students and faculty at the Salk Institute, San Diego State University and UCSD departments of Neurosciences, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Communication and Linguistics.
C. CONTRIBUTIONS OF CRL TO GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE TEACHING PROGRAMS
CRL has played an increasingly important role in teaching at UCSD. During this review period, CRL obtained and administered a training grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders, entitled "Language, Communication and the Brain." This five-year program provided four pre-doctoral and two-postdoctoral fellowships per year, with predoctoral fellowships awarded to students in the departments of Cognitive Science, Linguistics and Psychology. A proposal for the 5-year renewal of our NIDCD training program has just been submitted, with a request for an additional two predoctoral slots per year to accommodate students in the new joint doctoral program.
In 1996, a new joint doctoral program in Language and Communicative Disorders was founded, jointly administered by CRL (the administrative home at UCSD) and The School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at San Diego State University. Marilyn Newhoff serves as the director of the SDSU component, and CRL Director Bates co-directs the UCSD component with Psychology Department chairman David Swinney. The joint doctoral program enrolled its first graduate class in the fall of 1996.
In addition to these formal commitments to graduate teaching, the CRL laboratories serve as "home base" to a large number of undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students with a primary interest in language. These have included a substantial number of minority students who are attracted to the many cross-linguistic and multilingual projects underway in CRL, using their own special skills as fluent multilinguals while they learn about basic research in language development and language processing.