Researchers of Emory

Marissa Russell is a senior majoring in Linguistics and Spanish. She was awarded a Spring 2018 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on attention under Dr. Lynne Nygaard.  When I first pursued undergraduate research at Emory, I was unsure what to expect. I knew I had a strong interest in language and was intrigued by the research process, but I questioned how much meaningful experience I could gain (and how much I could truly contribute) as a junior in college. Now, looking back over the past two years in the Speech and Language Perception Lab, I can confidently say that research has been the most significant and rewarding aspect of my academic career.

Isabel Goddard is a Senior majoring in Cultural Anthropology and Quantitative Social Science. She was a recipient of a Spring 2017 Conference Grant and attended the Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium. I presented in the poster session of the Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium April 28 th 2017. [1] Attending this colloquium provided me with the opportunity to present my linguistic research findings  in an academic environment to students and faculty from across the world. The vast majority of the presentations reflected research students had conducted for their honors theses and these studies ranged from phonetic topics such as “Ergativity, Agreement, and the Sumerian Verbal Complex” to socio-linguistic research including “L’identité et la Frncophilie au Maroc: Examining the interplay of language perception and identity construction in the Moroccan student.” In this way, I was exposed to every form of linguistic research. The colloquium also included t...

Dalila Vasquez Herrera is a 2016 graduate who majored in Biology and Spanish. She was awarded a Spring 2016 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on language and healthcare communication in Oaxaca and Huajuapan de Leon, Mexico. Read more about her project in the Emory Report . “ They’re Mexican, so they speak Spanish. ” These words appeared an article in The New York Times about a hospital official in New York who called a Mexican organization to help her understand some Mexican patients. The quote above is what the hospital official responded when the person at the Mexican organization asked her if she had asked what language the family spoke. The hospital official just assumed they spoke Spanish, but the family actually spoke Mixtec, one of the many indigenous languages spoken within the borders of the Mexican nation-state and across Central America . This situation is not surprising to me because I’ve experienced this linguistic and cultural d...