Independent Study
If you're an undergraduate at the University of Rochester interested in learning how to run experiments, how to use corpora for language research, or, if you're interested in language modeling, you can apply for an independent study project. You will be working with a faculty member and other experienced lab members, participate in lab meetings, get started on existing projects (to learn the methods we use) and develop and conduct your own research. Independent studies allow the people you work with to get to know you, which means that they can write informative letters of recommendation for grad school applications.
Have a look at a list of previous independent studies conducted in the lab
Recent undergraduate direct research projects in the lab have included work on a variety of topics and often lead to conference presentations and/or B.A. theses:
- Syntactic production:
- Ambiguity avoidance in production
- Animacy effects on word order (Butler, Jaeger, Furth, Lemieux, Gomez Gallo, and Bohnemeyer, 2010)
- Complexity effects on word order
- Phonological production:
- similarity and identity effects on unscripted speech (Furth and Jaeger, 2010)
- Artificial language studies on language acquisition
- Computational models of efficient language production (Qian, 2009; Qian and Jaeger, 2009)
Work has involved the following languages so far:
- English
- Spanish
- Yucatec Mayan
- Mandarin Chinese
- artificial languages
Requirements
- You can take independent study for 1-4 credits. If you want to run your own study, even if it is a small project, this realistically compares to the workload of 4 credits. However, you can also decide to help out in a project and to just learn some of the steps involved in research on human language processing. In that case, maybe 2 credits are most appropriate. Depending on the number of credits you want to earn, there are different requirements.
- All independent study students need to create a wiki page. That page needs to list all references to readings (typically about 15-20 papers for 3-4 credits, but it could be less). It can also contain notes about the papers. You can find examples of directed reading pages on our wiki.
- If the goal is to design an experiment, then you will have to create a second page describing that project. This page will be a log book for your progress, describing the general idea, design choices, items, procedure, etc. of the experiment. There are several examples of such lab logs on our wiki (some are only accessible to HLP lab members). These wiki pages will help you to organize your thoughts, your advisor to assess your progress, and --most importantly, they will help future students interested in similar topics.
- If you plan to take 3-4 credits, you will also need to give a short (15-20 minute) informal presentation at the end of the semester to either the other RAs in the lab or the entire lab crowd (including graduate students, etc.). It's a very supportive environment and a great chance to get feedback on your project. There is no requirement for a write-up beyond what's mentioned above. The wiki pages are the write-up.
Funding
- If you are a low-income, first-generation, or underrepresented minority undergraduate you might be able to get funding through the McNair Program to do a semester-long mentored research project, which also helps with preparing to apply to graduate school.
- Glamour Top 10 College Women Prize
- Josephine de Karman Fellowship
- The department-internal Bishop and Biski-Mayer fellowships for excellence in undergraduate research typically provide between $1,500 to $5000 to pursue your own summer or semester research project under the guidance of one or several advisors. You need to be nominated by a faculty and you should have worked in a lab already.
Research Assistants
University Undergrad Jobs
In addition to the jobs we have to offer, the university has a site to search for undergrad research jobs.
Research Assistant - speech transcription & annotation
Right now we're looking for several hourly-paid research assistants for transcription and annotation work. You will be transcribing sound files that are produced by participants in our experiments. This includes transcription of the words being said, sometimes noting the presence of disfluencies, and/or structural annotations (such as what syntactic frame a structure has). A linguistic background is preferred but not necessary. Annotation work is a quick way to learn about the variety of structures speakers use, the patterns that are used frequently and what factors influence speakers' choices during online language production. You will meet with an experienced member of the lab regularly to get feedback on your annotation and to integrate suggestions you have for the process. This will also give you a chance to learn more about the experiments and the research conducted in our lab. Pay will be slightly above standard RA salaries. Minimum hours per week required are 5 (10 preferred).
Research Assistant - visual media
We are also searching for a research assistant for the creation of animated video stimuli. These stimuli will be used in psycholinguistic experimentations that elicit descriptions from participants (to study what influences how participants produce such descriptions). Stimuli are either pictures or videos. Creation of the stimuli requires use of software such as Photoshop and Poser, a 3D video animation program. We will train the RA in Poser during the first weeks of the job. Experience in other photo software is appreciated, but not required.
The types of pictures and scenes we require in our experiments, usually contain several people and objects and some variation in background. As you can see in the examples below, we don't care so about perfection of the details, but the scene needs to clearly elicit a certain type of transcription.
Example Videos
The following videos make up a single item from an experiment with two different kinds of contrasts. Each subject only will see one version of each item. In each video there is either one donut or two distinct (at sufficient resolution) donuts (with and without sprinkles) and one or two men (with different shirts). Clockwise from top left (or from top to bottom) we have
- Two donuts, two men
- One donut, two men
- Two donuts, one man
- One donut, one man
Further example videos are given at the following HLP Lab blog posting: Follow up experiments on sentence production in Yucatec.
Due to the training phase involved in acquiring proficiency in the relevant software, we are looking for someone who can at least commit for 1 year, preferably longer. We understand that the actual time students have to commit to this job will fluctuate from week to week (midterms, finals, etc.), but we are looking for someone who can on average dedicate 7-15h a week. You will also have an option to participate in conducting research, although you are, of course, not required to. If you are interested, please contact Dana Subik (dsubik@bcs.rochester.edu) or Andrew Watts (awatts@bcs.rochester.edu). If you choose to send a resume, please use PDF or plain text, not Word.
