Laboratories

Director: Jordan Kodner
Research in the Computational Linguistics Lab is concerned with the analysis of natural language phenomena using tools and concepts from mathematics and computer science, in particular statistics and probability theory, formal language theory, machine learning, algebra and logic. The lab suite includes a class room, workstations, a library, and access to a large number of corpora and software.

Director: Marie Huffman
The phonetics lab provides equipment for investigation of a wide range of linguistic questions, with special emphasis on speech acoustics, dialogue, and speech perception. The lab suite includes a lab classroom, a recording room and a research annex, with digital tape recorders, microphones, and headphones as well as equipment setups that allow for onscreen cueing and data acquisition as well as various methods of recording multi-person conversation and video recording of spoken or signed language.

Director: Richard Larson
The semantics Lab was created in 1992 by Richard K. Larson (Linguistics) and David S. Warren (Computer Science) as part of the NSF-sponsored Grammar as Science Project. Along with primary research in semantics, a focus of the lab has been the creation of software tools for linguistics research and education. Productions to date include Syntactica, a program for teaching transformational syntax and Semantica, a companion program for teaching truth-conditional natural language semantics. At present we are authoring a web-based application to assist students in developing basic parsing skills with phrase structure trees. This work is part of a new departmental hybrid on-line course The Anatomy of English (developed in collaboration with M. Aronoff and M. Lindsay).

Director: Jenny Singleton
Research in the Stony Brook Sign Language Lab focuses primarily on deaf children’s acquisition of American Sign Language as well as how adults socialize their acquisition process. We are also interested in sign language use by autistic individuals and individuals with language or learning disabilities. We use computer-based annotation tools to analyze videorecorded samples of sign language data collected in the field (e.g., deaf education classrooms), or in the lab.