Welcome to the UC Davis Cluster on Language Research!

The Cluster on Language Research is an interdisciplinary organization supporting any research and collaboration in the domain of “language”. The research interests of our members span a broad range of language-related topics, including but not limited to: language structure and variation, psycholinguistics, pedagogy, bilingualism, child language acquisition, second language development, sociolinguistics, and typology, to name a few. 

Each quarter, we host 3-5 talks or workshops where guest speakers from both UC Davis and beyond either present their innovative research or host professional development workshops. Some examples of past talks/workshops include: “Language and Ideology: Metaphors and Political Discourse”, “Attribute Representation with Neural Language Models”, “COWS-L2H: How team work brings the best out of corpus research”, “Everything you wanted to know about the academic job market (but were afraid to ask)”, “Hey Alexa, what job opportunities are available to linguists in Conversational AI?”. Click here to find out more about our talks for the upcoming year and about our past events!

On top of our quarterly talks, we also organize an annual symposium every May! Our symposium is run by a team of graduate students and attracts scholars from UC Davis, other American institutions, and beyond. Our theme this year is the intersection between language and technology.

The Cluster draws our diverse membership from many UC Davis departments, including Linguistics, Education, Psychology, Computer Science, Native American Studies, Mathematics, Spanish and Portuguese, French, German, Japanese, and others. In fact, all three of us (co-chairs) come from three different departments! Sara is from Spanish and Portuguese, Melissa is from Linguistics, and Andrea is from Psychology. 

The members of the Cluster are also part of various research communities at UC Davis, such as the Language Center, the Center for Mind and Brain (CMB), the Phonetics Lab, the Computational Linguistics Lab, the Ferreira Lab, the Morgan Lab, the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Lab, the Cognitive Neurolinguistic (Corina) Lab, the Language Learning (Graf Estes) Lab and the UC Davis Medical Center. 

Of course, the Cluster would not function at its best without the enthusiasm of our members, the wisdom of our current faculty advisor, Dr. Claudia Sánchez-Gutiérrez, and the guidance of former cluster chairpersons.

If you are interested in joining the Cluster and in hearing updates about our talks and symposium, please see the screenshot below to subscribe to our e-mail list! If you have any questions, you can e-mail us at: ucd.langsymposium@gmail.com.

We are looking forward to a fantastic year of talks and workshops, and of course, to our annual symposium in May!