TRAINING IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

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Abstract

The Psycholinguistics Training Program at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst is a community of researchers and students in the disciplines of Linguistics, Psychology, and Communication Disorders, including researchers at Smith College. The members of this community study both language acquisition and adult language performance, in the normal population and in populations of special interest such as speakers of African American English (AAE) and deaf individuals. The program is designed to provide students with expertise in psychological, linguistic, and communication-disorders based approaches to psycholinguistics. Its members share the belief that future advances in our understanding of language processing will most likely come from researchers who have such cross-disciplinary training. Predoctoral trainees (six requested) will be drawn from the Departments of Psychology, Linguistics, and Communication Disorders at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. They will fulfill all the normal requirements of their home department in addition to meeting a set of special requirements designed to provide cross-disciplinary training. They will receive the Ph.D. Degree in their home department. The postdoctoral trainees (two requested) will be chosen from young scholars who have received their Ph.D. in one of the disciplines involved and who want to gain expertise in the other disciplines. They will audit seminars and advanced courses in the disciplines of Linguistics, Communication Disorders, and Psychology, attend regular meetings of the psycholinguistics community as well as regular meetings of more specialized research groups, and conduct research in various topics in psycholinguistics in collaboration with program faculty, and independently. The program is designed to train psycholinguists, linguists, and specialists in communication disorders to do basic research in language acquisition and language behavior. Such research is proving valuable in understanding a variety of disorders of language acquisition and behavior (e.g., in aphasia and in deafness). The program provides students with excellent opportunities to explore the applicability of their basic research to disorders of language and to language in populations of unusual interest.