PhD Studentships in Child Language

[Danielle Matthews]

Dear Info-Childes Members, 

We would be very grateful if you would circulate this information to anyone who might be interested in applying for a PhD in Child Language at the University of Manchester, U.K. 

Many thanks, 

Danielle Matthews
Elena Lieven


Studentships within the Max Planck Child Study Centre

We have 1-2 studentships available for the academic year 2007-8.  Funding will consist of approximately 15,000 Euros per annum (about £10,000) plus excellent support for travel and equipment.  Home/EC fees will be paid by the Max Planck Institute.
  
The topic of the Ph.D. must be within the field of first language development using naturalistic and/or experimental data.  Our focus is on children learning either English or German although we have ongoing studies of Polish, French, Russian and Finnish. We are increasingly conducting comparative studies in different languages.  Below is a brief summary of some of the ongoing research in the Centre.

Naturalistic Studies
Ongoing research involves tracking the sources of children's developing constructions, including the transitives, questions and complex sentences. This is done through analyzing children's own prior speech and that of their caregivers. As well as using the Manchester corpus, available on the CHILDES database, we are also developing denser corpora. These corpora contain recordings of children taped for between 5 - 10 hours per week. This far better sampling rate allows for in depth analyses, which have never previously been possible. 

Experimental Studies
Experimental studies focus on a number of aspects of language acquisition, such as the development of general syntactic categories (such as noun and verb) and constructions (such as transitives and questions). We also look at how children learn to use pragmatically appropriate language (for example, using appropriate referring expressions). A number of different methodologies are used including priming, act-out tasks, training studies and preferential looking. Experiments often employ novel or frequency-controlled words to determine children's ability to extend their knowledge of language to words with which they are not familiar. 

Interested students are encouraged to contact Professor Elena Lieven by email for preliminary discussions. lieven at eva.mpg.de.  

Details of how to make a formal application and of other PhD projects available in the School of Psychological Sciences can be found at:

http://www.psych-sci.manchester.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/mphilphd/studentships/allstudentships/

First interviews will take place between March 2nd - April 16th.