Research projects

The following research projects are looking for some Research Assistants. If you are interested in participating in one of those projects, please contact the Principal Investigator.

[Important note: All of the projects listed on this page fall under the Department of Linguistics, but not necessarily the M&M lab; this is just a temporary home for such announcements in Spring 2017]

1. 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

2. 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

3. Use of spatial height for domain restriction in Japanese Gesture

  • Principal Investigator: Kate Davidson, kathryndavidson@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

4. 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.

5. Psycholinguistic studies

  • Principal Investigator: Yujing Huang, yujinghuang@fas.harvard.edu
  • What is involved: Generating 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