The Linguistics Department at Cornell is a center for research in the core areas of theoretical linguistics—syntax, phonology, semantics, pragmatics and phonetics—as well as in the interdisciplinary fields of computational linguistics and historical linguistics. A distinctive feature of the departmental character is research at the various interfaces, such as phonetics-phonology, phonology-syntax and syntax-semantics.

Many of the faculty have expertise in particular language areas, ranging from Romance, Germanic and Slavic to Cheyenne; the department is a distinguished center for comparative linguistics. Members of the department are also involved in various interdepartmental activities with Computer Science, Psychology, Classics and Philosophy.

Graduate student Shohini Bhattasali presenting research

Computational Linguistics Lab

The Cornell Computational Linguistics Lab is a research and educational lab in the Department of Linguistics and the Faculty of Computing and Information. It's a venue for lab sessions of classes, computational dissertation research by grad students, undergraduate research projects and grant research. The Lab is part of a larger Natural Language Processing group at Cornell, including faculty and students in Computer Science, Psychology and Information Science. Some computational work is also done on hardware at the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Advanced Computing.

Computational Psycholinguistic Discussions

Faculty and students in the Computational Psycholinguistic Discussions research group (C.Psyd) are interested in the intersection of computational linguistics and psycholinguistics. By building computational models to predict human language processing behavior (e.g., reading times), we can study the linguistic features that impact human processing decisions. Relatedly, C.Psyd members use psycholinguistic techniques to study the strategies used by neural networks to produce high accuracy in different language contexts, which gives us insights as to when different strategies might be employed by humans.

Linguistic Meaning Lab

At the Linguistic Meaning (LiMe) Lab we investigate the complex process by which humans assign meaning to utterances. To do so, we combine insights from linguistic theory and cognitive science more broadly with experimental and computational methods. Contact: haparicio@cornell.edu.

Phonetics Lab

Speech is built on a relation between our perception of sound and the movements we make to speak. Students and faculty in the Cornell Phonetics Lab research various aspects of speech perception and production, aiming to understand how speech patterns emerge and evolve.