#  Research Opportunities 

 



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## Current Research Opportunities for Undergraduates

Currently we do not have any ongoing research which can be an opportunity for undergrads to take place in; however, we are going to announce new research here. If you are interested in participating in one of the current research projects as a Research Assistant, please contact the Principal Investigator.

## Previous Linguistics Research Projects

**1. Experimental Syntax/Semantics**

- Principal Investigator: Hayley Ross, [hayleyross@g.harvard.edu](/hayleyross@g.harvard.edu)
- *What is involved:* Create sentences with specific syntactic/semantic phenomena (crossover, control/raising, ...) for use in experiments on humans and computational language models, help set up the experiments (for humans) in Qualtrics, and process the resulting data in R.
- *Prerequisites*: Working knowledge of syntax, LING 102 (Sentence Structure) or above.
- *What can be offered:* Course credit, experience designing experiments, experience with Qualtrics and R.

**2. Semantic changes in Romance**

- *Principal Investigator:* Lukas Kahl, <kahl@g.harvard.edu>; Gunnar Lund, <gunnarlund@g.harvard.edu>
- *What is involved:* Look for and catalog interesting semantic changes in Romance languages using an etymological dictionary.
- *Prerequisites:* Basic knowledge of German or Latin strongly preferred.
- *What can be offered:* Course credit and research experience.

**2. Development of the Polarity Subjunctive in Romance**

- *Principal Investigator:* Laurence B-Violette, <lbviolette@fas.harvard.edu>
- *What is involved:* Finding relevant examples in some of the Romance languages in articles and online corpora
- *Prerequisites:* Structural knowledge of at least one of the Romance languages, including Latin or medieval languages, would be preferred
- *What can be offered:* Funding or Research Experience

**3. Learning unnatural phonology**

- *Principal Investigator:* Gasper Begus, <begus@fas.harvard.edu>
- *What is involved:* Annotate some data with Praat
- *Prerequisites:* None
- *What can be offered:* Funding

**4. Use of spatial height for domain restriction in Japanese Gesture**

- *Principal Investigator:* Kate Davidson, [kathryndavidson@fas.harvard.edu](mailto:stranahan@fas.harvard.edu)
- *What is involved:* Carefully code videos of Japanese speakers telling stories, for their use of gestures for different set sizes
- *Prerequisites:* Working knowledge of Excel, and fluent or native knowledge of spoken Japanese, including having lived in Japan for most of childhood
- *What can be offered:* Research experience, or Credit, or Funding

**5. Investigating vowel quality in Belarusian**

- *Principal Investigator:* Lena Borise, <borise@fas.harvard.edu>
- *What is involved:*  Making measurements of the acoustic properties of vowels (pitch, intensity, duration) in Belarusian acoustic data using ELAN and Praat
- *Prerequisites:* None
- *What can be offered:* Research Experience, including training in ELAN and Praat and experience working on an understudied language

**6. Psycholinguistic studies**

- *Principal Investigator:* Yujing Huang, <yujinghuang@fas.harvard.edu>
- *What is involved: G*enerating stimuli, setting up experiments for online and in-lab studies, collecting in-lab data with adult participants.
- *Prerequisites:* None, some basic knowledge of linguistics is preferred.
- *What can be offered:* Research experience