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The ESRC international Centre for research in language and communicative development

The LuCiD Centre is an ESRC funded, multi-million pound, 5-year research collaboration between the Universities of Lancaster, Liverpool, and Manchester, and affiliated institutions abroad. The Centre will study how children learn to communicate with language, how the developing brain supports this process, and how it is affected by cross-linguistic, socio-cultural and individual variation.

The PhD project

1. Background:
This PhD studentship addresses the question of which aspects of language acquisition are specific to language learning and which are general purpose mechanisms? Language acquisition draws upon a range of apparently domain general information sources and it is generally assumed that language structure has adapted at least in part in order to align with the general purpose cognitive mechanisms in place in the brain (Christiansen & Chater, 2008). One way to establish the domain generality of processing of language acquisition is to compare learning of linguistic material against learning of informationally equivalent structure presented in a non-linguistic medium (Conway & Christiansen, 2006). As an example, the duration of final syllables of words tends to be longer than initial or medial syllables and learners can utilise this information to assist in determining word boundaries from continuous speech (Monaghan, White, & Merkx, 2013). Previous work has found that sequences of shapes and sequences of syllables are enhanced equivalently by lengthening of the final-element for both types of information (Frost & Monaghan, submitted), suggesting that general cognitive and perceptual processes are utilized to assist in language acquisition.

The PhD project will apply the same principle to acquisition of other language structures, such as grammatical categories, word-referent mappings, or learning syntactic structures, comparing learning these tasks from linguistic and non-linguistic information. The PhD project aligns closely with the themes of research investigating a rich range of environmental cues and their role in learning words, grammatical categories, and syntactic structure, and will consequently benefit from association with the LuCiD Centre research. However, the project topic offers degrees of freedom to enable the PhD student to develop their own line of investigation within this framework.

The PhD will be supervised by Padraic Monaghan and Stefan Koelsch at Lancaster University and Caroline Rowland at Liverpool University.

2. Research questions:
Which processes involved in language acquisition are language-specific and which are general cognitive processes?
For which levels of language structure are processes general and for which are they language-specific? For instance, are general cognitive processes more likely for identifying words, or for learning word-referent pairings, or for learning grammatical categories of words?

3. Research methods:
The studies will use artificial grammar learning paradigms, comparing learning from verbal material (auditorially and/or visually presented) with learning from non- linguistic auditory or visual information (sequences of non-verbal sounds or abstract shapes), testing both adults and children.

The PhD student will then, with guidance, test other aspects of grammatical category learning, or broaden the studies to test general cognitive processes applied in learning other aspects of language structure, such as word reference, or syntactic structures, according to their own interests in honing their own research programme.

4. Applying:
You should apply online here by the deadline of 28th February 2015. In the application, please state that you are interested in the LuCiD PhD in language acquisition with Padraic Monaghan. In place of the research proposal within the application form, please include a 300-500 word statement of why the project is of particular interest to you and how the project meets your skills and future aspirations. For further information concerning the studentship, please contact Prof. Padraic Monaghan (p.monaghan@lancaster.ac.uk), and about postgraduate study more generally, please contact the Department of Psychology postgraduate office (postgraduate.psychology@lancaster.ac.uk).

References:
Christiansen, M.H. & Chater, N. (2008). Language as shaped by the brain. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 31, 489-558.
Conway, C.M. & Christiansen, M.H. (2006). Statistical learning within and between modalities: Pitting abstract against stimulus-specific representations. Psychological Science, 17, 905-912.
Frost, R.L.A., & Monaghan, P. (submitted). Learning or exaptation of cues for language learning: Use of lengthening for speech segmentation. Submitted manuscript.
Monaghan, P., White, L., & Merkx, M. (2013). Disambiguating durational cues for speech segmentation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 134, EL45-EL51.
St Clair, M., Monaghan, P., & Ramscar, M. (2009). Relationships between language structure and language learning: The suffixing preference and grammatical categorization. Cognitive Science, 33, 1317-1329.