Landahl Center
The Karen Landahl Center for Linguistics Research offers state-of-the-art facilities that provide a convenient meeting place for faculty, students and research associates interested in the nature of language. Housed in the Social Sciences Research Building at the University of Chicago, the Landahl Center is home to four research and teaching laboratories:
- The Chicago Language Modeling Lab, directed by Jason Riggle, has three primary goals: 1) to computationally implement linguistic models; 2) to discover and implement learning algorithms for those models; 3) to test the predictions of the models by simulating language learning, use, and change among populations of interacting language-using agents.
- The Discourse Analysis Laboratory is directed by Robin Shoaps and is designed for collaborative research on naturally occurring language use. Using methods and conceptual frameworks from anthropology, comparative human development and linguistics, researchers come together to collect, preserve and analyze digital data from a variety of social contexts and languages. Current projects involve the analysis of gesture and discourse markers in student-tutor interactions; prosodic and linguistic anthropological analysis of conservative talk radio and other media forms; and the analysis of Christian religious discourse in the United States (among evangelicals) and in Sakapultek and K’iche’ Maya. The lab is equipped with state of the art audio and video recording equipment (available for check out by University of Chicago graduate students) and software for transcription, sound and video editing, transcript notation and markup, and prosodic and gesture analysis.
- The Phonology Laboratory, directed by Alan Yu, is dedicated to the teaching and investigation of phonological typology as well as the variation and change of sound systems. It also functions as the center for language documentation research within the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. The lab, which houses a double-walled sound-attenuated IAC recording booth, is fully equipped to gather and analyze physiological, acoustic, and perceptual data.
- The Semantics Lab, directed by Chris Kennedy, is a center for work on all aspects of the study of meaning in natural language and the relation between meaning and other aspects of grammar and cognition. The central mission of the Lab is to provide a forum for researchers in linguistics and related disciplines (philosophy, psychology, anthropology, computer science) who are working on issues in syntax, semantics and pragmatics to come together and discuss and develop their research in a productive, collaborative environment, and to support experimental and computational work on the processing and representation of semantic and pragmatic information.
- The Language Processing Lab is broadly interested in experimental syntax, experimental semantics and pragmatics, and psycholinguistics. Our research projects aim at identifying the linguistic representations we construct in language comprehension and production, and the way we construct them. We use a broad range of methodologies, including self-paced reading, eyetracking and ERP (Event-related-potential) recordings.