The Linguistics Department provides a variety of resources to support research and learning by students and faculty, including the Linguistics Lab, Linguistics Classroom, Linguistics Research Commons, Linguistics Reading Room, and the Santa Barbara Archive of Language and Discourse. The department also provides Field Recording Equipment to support graduate student research. Additionally, there are many external resources which may be useful.
Linguistics Lab
The Producing and Perceiving Language Lab (PRPL Lab)
The PRPL Lab is a research laboratory focused on language production and procession in conversational contexts via experimental methods, corpora, and meta-scientific investigations. We study how individuals integrate multiple candidate representations of meaning (words, ideas) and form (syntax, phonology) through time in language productions and language comprehension with support from cognitive mechanisms such as memory and attention. Laboratory equipment includes audio-recording equipment and two eye-trackers that can be used to test single or paired participants.
Computational Psycholinguistics of Listening and Speaking Lab (CPLS Lab)
The CPLS Lab combines computational, experimental, and corpus-based methods to conduct research in speec perception and computational linguistics, especially from cognitive and social perspectives. The lab hosts powerful workstation computers and maintains a sound booth and webserver that are available for all department members to use. Information about current members and research can be fouind on the lab website
Linguistics Classroom
Our new classroom (3605 South Hall) incorporates a number of features designed to support innovative forms of teaching uniquely suited to the study of language and linguistics. Instructors, teaching assistants, and course participants can all present their work and their instruction via wireless access to data projectors. Multiple large monitors in the classroom allow small groups to gather in breakout sessions to analyze audio and video data. All tables and chairs are on casters, allowing real-time reconfiguration of the class from lecture format to small collaborative groups as the need arises during an ongoing class session.
Santa Barbara Archive of Language and Discourse
The Santa Barbara Archive of Language and Discourse (SBALD) houses rare archival research materials on languages and linguistics from many languages, including audio and video recordings documenting languages from around the world. The primary holdings document the cumulative research activity of UCSB faculty and graduate students over the past half-century, and in many cases represent unique and irreplaceable recordings of speakers of endangered languages. In keeping with the research focus of the department, many of the recordings document both grammatical, lexical, and phonological elicitation, and naturally occurring discourse, across a typologically diverse sampling of the world’s languages.
Field Recording Equipment
The Linguistics Department is strongly committed to introducing students to the state of the art digital technologies to support their linguistic research, including linguistic field work. Graduate students are able to borrow equipment provided by the department to support their field research, including high quality digital audio recorders, video recorders, and microphones
The Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English
The Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English is based on a large body of recordings of naturally occurring spoken interaction from all over the United States. The Santa Barbara Corpus represents a wide variety of people of different regional origins, ages, occupations, genders, and ethnic and social backgrounds. The predominant from a language use represented is face-to-face conversation, but the corpus also documents many other ways that people use language in their everyday lives: telephone conversations, card games, food preparation, on-the-job talk, classroom lectures, sermons, story-telling, town hall meetings, tour-guide spiels, and more.
More information about the corpus can be found here.
Pear Film Word Corpus
A six-minute film that was produced at the University of California at Berkeley in 1975 and shown to speakers of a number of languages, who were asked to tell what happened in it. In the meantime, it has been used in a variety of other studies across other languages. The goal has been to present cinematically a series of more or less natural events to multiple viewers, who are then asked to verbalize what they remember. See Wallace Chafe (ed.), The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex (1980).
Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics
Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics is published occasionally by the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. All issues of Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics may be downloaded from here.
External Resources
Linguists at UCSB may find the following resources useful. Additional lists of external resources especially for UCSB undergraduates may be found in the undergraduate resource page and the LingClub page.
General resources for UCSB students
- UCSB Library – Main Page with links to off campus log-in, Melvyl Catalog, electronic articles, etc.
- UCSB U-Mail – E-mail and web storage
- UCSB Office of Research – Office of Research, Internal Review Board, Human Subjects
- UCSB Grad Div – Applying for admission, graduation, and other forms
- UCSB BARC – Billing and employment services
- UCSB GOLD – Register for classes
- UCSB E-grades – Access to electronic grading
- Basic Needs - Assistance for Basic Needs
- UCSB TPS – Transportation and Parking Services
- When's the next bus? – Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District
General resources for linguists
- LINGUIST List – Publications, jobs, internships, conference calls, and more
- SIL International – Fonts, software, and other tools for linguists
- Ethnologue – Catalog of the world's languages
- Max Planck Institute Resources – Tools and databases for typology and fieldwork
- TalkBank – Database of transcribed audio and video
- Praat – Acoustic phonetics software
- ELAN – Software for annotating audio and video
- NLTK – Natural Language Processing Toolkit