Linguists at Planet Word summer school

Grads and faculty help undergrads adapt a Cloze study to the museum context.

This summer the Planet Word museum hosted an undergraduate course on language science research and public engagement in the museum context, led by LSC faculty member Charlotte Vaughn - with NSF support to her and Yi Ting Huang (2116959), coordinated with complementary grants to Deanna Gagne at Gallaudet (2116811) and Patrick Plummer at Howard (2116932) - plus lots of help from many students and faculty in our department. Craig Thorburn, London Dixon and Katherine Howitt served as mentors to the students, and joined Rosa Lee, Masato Nakamura, Hanna Muller *21, and HESP postdoc Tal Ness in a team headed by Colin Phillips, that deployed a study called "Race the Robot," which adapts a sentence-completion task to the setting of the museum. The fifteen participating undergraduates, drawn from Maryland and six other universities in our area, collected data from roughly 1000 museum visitors in the space of four weeks. This is an initial part of the new Language Science Station at the museum, which Colin, Andrea Zukowski, Rochelle Newman and Jan Edwards have done much to develop over the last few years. Here is a recent PBS News Hour report on the museum.