The Linguistics Department at KU has undergone significant changes in the past decade to position itself as a unique program that unites linguistic theory and experimental research. We have particular strengths in experimental phonetics and phonology, first and second language acquisition, developmental psycholinguistics, second language psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, the cognitive neuroscience of language, linguistic fieldwork, and theoretical syntax and semantics. Our faculty members and graduate students study a broad range of languages including understudied language varieties in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The department has six active research labs, which have all successfully competed for external funding and provide support for graduate studies. The department has both head-mounted and remote eye trackers, an EEG laboratory, and on the KU medical center campus, cortical MEG, fetal MEG and MRI systems. We offer both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. We invite you to explore our graduate degree program further at our website: http://linguistics.ku.edu/
Funding
The Linguistics Department is able to offer financial support in the form of fellowships and graduate teaching or research assistantships. In the 2015-2016 academic year we will be able to award one Chancellor’s Fellowship, a prestigious award administered by KU for which there are only six each year, which offers a generous funding package for 5 years of doctoral study. Multi-year funding packages will also be available for students who can serve as Graduate Research Assistants on two funded grant projects: a project on prosody and second language speech segmentation (directed by Dr. Annie Tremblay, atrembla@ku.edu) and a project on tone sandhi in Chinese dialects (directed by Dr. Jie Zhang, zhang@ku.edu).
Students who are interested in these research positions should contact these faculty members directly. In addition, funding will be available on a competitive basis for other fellowships and Graduate Teaching Assistantships in the department. All applicants will be automatically considered for these awards.
Placement
Recent Ph.D. graduates of our program have enjoyed successful job placement as postdoctoral researchers and tenure-track professors at a variety of institutions around the world. Recent graduates have attained postdoctoral positions at universities such the University of Chicago, New York University, University of Reading, the Basque Center on Brain, Cognition, and Language, and tenure-track appointments at colleges and universities such as Indiana University, Mississippi State University, Harding College, Hankyung National University in Korea, and the University of Costa Rica.
Lawrence, KS
Lawrence is a dynamic college town located 45 minutes from downtown Kansas City. We have an art theatre, a local brewery, multiple museums, great coffee shops, several natural foods grocers, many farmers markets, and the most amazing sunflower fields you will ever see.
Apply
Information on admission requirements is available at: https://linguistics.ku.edu/admission
The deadline to apply for the Fall 2015 semester is January 1, 2015.
If you have questions, please contact the Director of Graduate Studies, Dr. Alison Gabriele at gabriele@ku.edu.
