Graduate study in psycholinguistics at UMass
A .PDF COPY OF THE PREVIOUS TRAINING GRANT PROPOSAL, FOR THE USE OF CORE GRANT PERSONNEL
The psycholinguistics training program at UMass has enjoyed 15 years
of funding from the National Institutes of Health. Its goal is to provide
interdisciplinary training in psycholinguistics to students whose primary
training is in Linguistics, Psychology, or Communication Disorders. The
program faculty firmly believe that research in psycholinguistics is done
best by people whose training extends beyond traditional disciplinary
boundaries; a good psycholinguist has to know about linguistics and psychology
and disorders of language use.
The traineeships that the program provides allows students to spend one
or two years mastering the knowledge and research techniques of fields
other than their own that contribute to psycholinguistics. A Linguistics
student may, for example, spend a year doing research in the Psychology
Department's eyetracking laboratory or may spend a year in the Communication
Disorders department doing experiments on the development of tense and
aspect in African American English-speaking children. A Psychology student
may take a series of courses and seminars in Linguistics, leading to the
Masters degree in Linguistics, or may participate with Communication Disorders
researchers in developing techniques for training aphasic patients to
read in a skilled and automatic fashion. A Communication Disorders students
may take advanced seminars in cognitive psychology and join with Linguistics
Department and Smith College researchers in studying how children learn
to use and comprehend quantifiers.
While graduate training in psycholinguistics at UMass is tailored to the
individual student's needs, all students who receive traineeships are
expected to take substantial coursework and to become involved in original
research outside their home department. A traineeship is a stipend that
does not require any duties of the student; it permits the student to
spend full time for a year learning what he or she most needs to learn
to be a fine psycholinguist.
You should visit the home pages of the Psychology,
Communication Disorders,
and Linguistics Departments
and the University of Massachusetts
itself to learn how to apply to graduate
school at UMass. You should also visit the home pages of the laboratories
involved in psycholinguistic research, since much of your training will
take place in them.