Project Contact: Stan Dubinsky

The Language Conflict Project is an interdisciplinary research collaborative across Political Science, Linguistics, and Digital Humanities studying the relationship between language and human conflict, investigating how linguistic differences and language policies impact the onset, escalation, and resolution of political conflicts. 

While research on nationalism and ethnicity has long acknowledged the crucial role that language plays in shaping group identity and social cohesion, researchers have struggled to identify any statistical correlation between language and conflict. Our project offers novel solutions to address this longstanding problem. 

With better data and a clearer model of how language contributes to conflict processes, we demonstrate strong statistical correlations among linguistic difference, language policy, language demography, and political conflict, and introduce improved methods for evaluating these correlations.

By illuminating the role of language in political conflict, our work challenges prevailing assumptions and enhances the state of knowledge in conflict studies. This can lead to more effective conflict resolution strategies and policies that account for the complexities of language dynamics. Furthermore, our methodological innovations, including AI-powered translation techniques and extensive linguistic data analysis, can be applied to other interdisciplinary studies, fostering advancements in computational linguistics and other social sciences. Our findings have the potential to inform international policymaking by promoting more inclusive and nuanced approaches to managing linguistic diversity in multiethnic states. 

Project Contact: Stan Dubinsky

The Wordification™ Project is developing a web-based game system aimed at providing a language-based (as opposed to memory based) tool for English spelling instruction, and one that does not rely on teacher training. The application will be engineered so as to provide individuated instruction that can accommodate a full spectrum of learners. It will also offer dialectally enhanced instruction for speakers of non-mainstream English dialects and careful-casual pronunciation contrasts for non-native English speakers. As a resource that can deliver as much or as little spelling instruction as any given student may need, it will provide students who have decoding deficits (e.g., dyslexia) a path to enhanced literacy that would otherwise be missing from their education. The goal of this project is to provide a universally accessible, low-cost intervention nation-wide, and thereby to have a substantial positive impact on literacy (and hence national economic welfare) in every educational jurisdiction in which it is utilized.

Project Contact: Emily Manetta

Project link: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2347686&HistoricalAwards=false

This funded project looks to support community-driven documentation of and research on the vitality of some of Mediterranean Europe’s most critically-endangered, rarely-studied, and underdocumented Romani and Sinti languages, and the deposit of that documentation with the Pangloss archive. Roma  and Sinti people constitute one of Europe’s largest and most widespread minorities, with significant social, linguistic, and historical unity and connection despite their geographically broad and temporally deep distribution from Turkey to Spain. They are also subjects of some of longstanding persecution, exclusion, and marginalization, and victims of perpetual violence (see, for example, Vermeersch 2006, van Baar 2010, 2017; Fraser 1992). Linguistic and other data point to a Romani origin in India. Various competing theories place the proto-Romani departure from the Indian Subcontinent between 1500 and 1000 years ago, with a probable route through the Karakoram Himalaya, Georgia, Armenia, and Byzantine Anatolia. 
The goal of the project is the community-based participatory documentation and reclamation of several endangered and underdocumented forms of Romani: Piemontese, Venetian, and Lombard Sinti (hereafter Southern Alpine (SA) Sinti) as spoken in southeastern France and northeastern Italy (Formoso and Calvet 1987; Scala 2017, 2020b; Tribulato 2022); and the distinctive, highly-imperiled, and isolated Romani of far southern Italy, usually referred to as Abruzzo-Molise-Calabrian Romani (hereafter Southern Italian (SI) Romani), and usually considered a single form (Matras 2002; Scala 2013, 2020a). Successful completion of the project will result in long-term permanent archiving of endangered varieties and community-centered access to the results. The formal outcomes of the project are to create a community-based physical and virtual interactive “listening room,” with associated activities, and an online corpus of transcribed and glossed interviews and stories which can be used both for research and educational enrichment.

Project Contact: Mila Tasseva

The Bilingual Mental Lexicon (BML) is a project that seeks to understand (i) the relationship between orthography and phonology, and (ii) the effect of lexical syntax on the processing of cognates by bilinguals in a range of languages. The project is an interdisciplinary and interinstitutional collaboration between the Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism lab at USC and the Grammar in Aphasia and Bilingualism lab at University of Montana. Our research questions include the following: Do bilinguals that speak languages using the same, different or partially overlapping orthographies exhibit the cognate facilitation effect to the same extent? Are bilinguals of varying literacy levels affected by the orthographic similarities between the languages the same? What is the relationship between lexical syntax and bilingual lexical processing? How does bimodal bilingualism affect lexical processing? Our ultimate goal is to provide a clear picture of the cognitive factors influencing bilingual lexical processing and propose pathways for teaching and learning additional languages.

Project Contact: Mila Tasseva

This project seeks to uncover how subsequent language learners at varying proficiency parse the grammatical features of gender, number and definiteness. One strand of the project looks at native speakers of English who are early second language learners and heritage speakers of various languages that encode these features and asks the following questions: Is the processing of these features dependent on the structure of the target language? Do comprehension and production follow the same pathways cross-linguistically? Does syntax per se (vs. morpho-syntax) regulate the acquisition and processing of the features? The second strand of the project deals with the source and specifics of cross-linguistic influences in language acquisition beyond the second language. We look beyond the traditional questions of whether the first or the second language, the typologically closer or the newer addition to the cognitive system serve as the source of transfer and into the specific compositions of the morpho-syntactic features and their effects on processing and acquisition.