£1 MILLION GRANT TO SHED LIGHT ON HOW WE LEARN LANGUAGES

Over five years (2017-2023), a Research Leadership Award from the Leverhume Trust has allowed the Out of Our Minds team to develop new, cognitively plausible ways of describing speakers’ linguistic knowledge, by using computational modelling techniques that mimic the way in which humans learn. The patterns were then verified experimentally in the lab before being tested on adult foreign language learners in the classroom.

The project has lead a step-change in research on language and language learning by capturing the linguistic knowledge adult speakers build up when they are exposed to a language in natural settings. These insights help with the development of strategic language teaching materials to transform the way in which we teach foreign languages.

The interdisciplinary project involves a team of linguists, psychologists and computer scientists. The team is led by Professor Dagmar Divjak from the University’s School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music and the School of English, Drama and American and Canadian Studies, in close collaboration with Professor Petar Milin, School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music.

The Research Leadership Award is one of the largest and most prestigious that the Leverhulme Trust awards. The scheme runs roughly every four years. Each university is limited to one bid only.

The Leverhulme Trust was established by the Will of William Hesketh Lever, the founder of Lever Brothers. Since 1925 the Trust has provided grants and scholarships for research and education. Today, it is one of the largest all-subject providers of research funding in the UK, distributing approximately £80m a year.

£1.2 MILLION GRANT TO CULTIVATE EXCELLENCE AMONG THE NEXT GENERATION OF LINGUISTS

MEDAL stands for Methodological Excellence in Data-Driven Approaches to Linguistics. MEDAL's mission is to build expertise in data-driven linguistic methodology across an international consortium consisting of the University of Tartu in Estonia, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University in the Netherlands and the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.

As the acronym suggests, MEDAL has a particular emphasis on methods used in linguistic research and specifically on ones in which the data drives the development of the theory. As the field of linguistics is changing with the availability of new technology, we want to bring attention to the variety of methods one can use and their interdisciplinarity.

As the acronym suggests, MEDAL has a particular emphasis on methods used in linguistic research and specifically on ones in which the data drives the development of the theory. As the field of linguistics is changing with the availability of new technology, we want to bring attention to the variety of methods one can use and their interdisciplinarity. For example, while linguistics is traditionally placed within the humanities, many current research topics have more in common with social sciences, computer science and biology. In this project, we highlight three empirical methods for linguistic research: experiments, corpus studies and computational linguistics, as each partner has expertise related to these fields. The partner institutes will organise exchange visits for scholars and conduct collaborative research. These collaborations will also be explicitly empowering for early-career researchers.

Besides increasing the visibility of the variety of linguistic methods, we also aim to increase the availability of resources for data from under-studied languages. Studying and preserving under-studied languages is crucial, as it both empowers the communities where these languages are spoken and also strengthens linguistic theory by broadening our knowledge and gaining insights that these languages can offer us.

For more information, see https://medal.ut.ee

The 3-year MEDAL project is funded by the European Commission’s Twinning scheme: Twinning (europa.eu). This is a part of the EC’s Horizon grant, Grant agreement ID: 101079429. The UK pillar is funded by the UKRI Horizon Guarantee Fund https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/apply-for-horizon-europe-guarantee-funding/