Workshop:The International Linguistics Olympiad

Brandeis University, Waltham MA

Investigators

Abstract

Attracting and training new students in linguistics is essential to meeting the nation's needs for research in language and communication. This award will provide travel support for two teams of American high school students to participate in the 12th International Linguistics Olympiad, which will take place in Beijing, China, in July, 2014. More than 100 of the world's brightest and most motivated high school students will gather for the Linguistics Olympiad. The American teams, each comprised of four students, were top finishers in the 8th North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO), held in January and March, 2014. The International Linguistics Olympiad provides students with a hands-on experience of the scientific approach to linguistics and the documentation and analysis of language. Unlike math and science Olympiads, which focus on material that students have already mastered, linguistics Olympiads introduce new material through logic puzzles in languages unfamiliar to the students. In the course of solving a puzzle, the students can discover something about the grammar or sounds of a language, its conceptual system, its associated culture, or its historical relationship to other languages. In addition to fostering insight into human linguistic and cultural diversity, this competition fosters meta-linguistic reasoning that is essential for computer science, language technologies, and indeed any career involving analytical problem-solving skills and the ability to present a logical argument supported by data. Because it has been the tradition of linguistics Olympiads to base half of the score on the written explanation of the answer, the contests also encourage the ability to clearly present a hypothesis and explain how it is supported by the data.