IGERT: Unifying the Science of Language

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For generations, uncovering the nature of human language has challenged researchers across a range of disciplines. Breakthrough progress requires a highly multidisciplinary yet integrated research effort, necessitating a new kind of language scientist capable of working across traditional disciplinary boundaries. This IGERT award facilitates the development of such scientists, further developing the Problem-Centered Training approach pioneered at Johns Hopkins. Through the programs Computational and Experimental Tracks, trainees will learn to deploy the diversity of methods and perspectives of linguistics, experimental psychology, computer science, cognitive neuroscience and mathematics in the attack of a single problem in the domain of language. Through an international component, trainees will gain experience in the laboratories of foreign pioneers in multiple disciplines, and will engage in research on languages other than English. Linguistics has been undergoing a revolutionary transformation, expanding its horizons to embrace the full cognitive science of language. Trainees in this IGERT will, through their graduate work and beyond, play a vital role in completing this transformation, and in bridging a number of fundamental schisms currently dividing language science. Breakthroughs arising from a unified science of language will have major long-term impact on language education. In the short term, scientists trained in the Computational Track will transfer insight from linguistic theory to language engineering, impacting commercial and security technology. Through a suite of special outreach mechanisms targeting not only Ph.D. applicants, but also their faculty mentors and a broader undergraduate population, the program promotes the involvement of underrepresented minorities in scientific research. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.