UNIVERSITY PARK – Eight undergraduate students and three graduate students make up the first group of Penn State students embarking on an innovative research internship program in one of four countries this summer, under the auspices of The Center for Language Science, based in Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts and College of Health and Human Development.
Funding for the research internships comes from a $2.8 million National Science Foundation grant through its Partnership for International Research and Education (PIRE) program. Under this program, an international team of researchers at 10 participating universities including Penn State are working collaboratively to understand the nature of the bilingual mind and brain, and the processes of bilingual language development. The project offers unique research opportunities with different bilingual populations in the U.S. and abroad for not only the faculty researchers, but also for their undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows who aspire to be the next generation of language scientists.
“These Penn State students have a unique opportunity to conduct scientific research with our international collaborators studying bilinguals who speak a variety of languages (e.g., Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, German, Welsh, and Chinese as well as signed languages),” said principal investigator Judith Kroll, distinguished professor of psychology, linguistics and women’s studies. ”Our research targets a diverse group of bilinguals from the U.S. and international sites in Asia and Europe, from young Hispanic children whose bilingualism may affect the development of literacy skills, to adult speakers of many different spoken languages, and deaf individuals whose bilingualism entails the use of sign language together with a written language. The outcomes of our research will have broad implications for the sciences of language, mind, and brain, for the education and learning of languages, and for society as a whole.”
The undergraduates who qualify for the research internships need to have completed at least a semester of research experience with a faculty member in the Center for Language Science (CLS) at Penn State. This spring semester, the selected students are gaining valuable mentoring and scientific research training with the CLS faculty and graduate students, in an apprenticeship model. They also receive training in language skills of their host country. This spring and summer, the students will travel to a PIRE university overseas and work in a research laboratory, collaborating with the host faculty and graduate student mentors.
This spring’s and summer’s participants and their majors or academic programs are:
- — Beijing Normal University, China: undergraduates Patrick Clark, psychology, and Nicole Wasilus, communication science and disorders; and graduate student Benjamin Zinszer, psychology;
- — University of Granada, Spain: undergraduates Nathan Hollister, Spanish and world languages education, and Lauren Perrotti, Spanish and Italian; graduate students Jason Gullifer, psychology, and Jorge Valdes Kroff, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese;
- — University of Tarragona, Spain: undergraduates Kylee Cook, biology and Spanish; and Rachel Negron, international politics and Spanish;
- — Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands: James Graham, international politics and French and Francophone studies;
- — The Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany: undergraduate Rebecca Leimkuhler, psychology and business.
Co-principal investigators for the PIRE project are: Paola Dussias, associate professor of Spanish and linguistics; Ping Li, professor of psychology, linguistics, and information sciences and technology, and Janet van Hell, professor of psychology and linguistics and director of the program in linguistics.
Affiliated faculty at Penn State are Chip Gerfen, associate professor of Spanish and linguistics and head of the department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese; Carrie Jackson, assistant professor of German and linguistics; John Lipski, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Spanish and linguistics; Richard Page, associate professor of German and linguistics and head of the department of German and slavic languages and literatures; and Daniel Weiss, associate professor of psychology and linguistics.
The U.S. institutions in the PIRE partnership are the NSF-supported Science of Learning Center at Gallaudet University, the leading university for the deaf, and Haskins Laboratories, a premiere research institute for language, literacy, and neuroscience study, affiliated with Yale University. The international partners are University of Granada and University of Tarragona, both in Spain; University of Hong Kong and Beijing Normal University, both in China; the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany; University of Bangor, Wales, United Kingdom; and Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
The Center for Language Science represents faculty in the Colleges of the Liberal Arts and Health and Human Development, who work closely together in interdisciplinary collaboration, and who are the largest group of faculty and students in the U.S. conducting prominent research on the cognitive basis of bilingualism and second language learning.