What is LURAP?
- The Linguistics Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (LURAP) matches Linguistics undergraduate research apprentices to graduate student and faculty led research projects.
- LURAP provides undergraduate students with the opportunity to participate in original linguistic research.
- Undergraduate Research Apprentices will earn 1-5 units (CR/NC) in Linguistics 499B. (Note: LURAP units may fulfill up to 6 elective units toward the Linguistics Major.)
Benefits
Apprentices will:
- gain skills and experience with independent linguistic research and a body of linguistic data;
- gain proficiency in discipline-specific methods, equipment, and software;
- gain a better understanding of the general research and scholarship process and what it is like to be a linguistics graduate student;
- become more competitive candidates for admission to graduate school;
- gain experience relevant to future jobs;
- develop a relationship with a mentor who may provide advice, references, etc.; and
- the opportunity to develop independent research which may lead to an honors thesis down the line.
Mentors will:
- gain experience with supervision and mentorship;
- be more productive through having some of their research tasks completed by an assistant;
- become more competitive on the academic and non-academic job markets.
The department will:
- have a mentorship program that may entice more undergraduates to major in linguistics and more graduate students to apply to UW;
- produce more experienced and competitive BA graduates.
Responsibilities
- The mentor and apprentice(s) should meet and communicate regularly.
- An apprentice should work 3 hours per week, including the weekly meeting, for every Ling 499B unit in which they are enrolled (1-5 units). The course is repeatable for credit.
- Apprentices are expected to work on the same project for a minimum of two consecutive quarters.
- The tasks performed by the apprentice will depend on the nature of the mentor’s research project and the apprentice’s abilities and interests. Tasks might include coding data, entering field notes into a database, parsing texts, gathering data from written sources (including library research), performing statistical analyses, running subjects for a study, transcription, etc.
- The mentor-apprentice pairs will all meet at the end of the quarter (during finals week) to share their experiences.
- Apprentices may be asked by their research mentor to present their work at the end of the quarter, either as an oral presentation or a term paper.
Eligibility
- LURAP is open to all majors and all class standings (Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior).
- Each project will have distinct eligibility criteria, such as completed courses, experience, and/or knowledge of certain languages.
- The majority of projects will require apprentices to have completed LING 200A (Introduction to Linguistics) with a grade of 2.0 or better.
Timeline
- Graduate students and faculty will be required to submit their call for projects roughly 6-8 weeks before the beginning of the quarter.
- Applications for undergraduate students opens roughly 2-3 weeks before the beginning of the quarter.
- At this time, applicants will be able to view the different project opportunities. They will be required to fill out a detailed Google Form in which they will have the opportunity to select and rank projects in which they would like to participate. Applicants may also be required to provide a CV and transcript.
- Each application will undergo a review process to evaluate quality and fit before apprentices are matched to a project. Depending on the demand for apprentices, it is possible that not all applications will be matched to a project.
- LURAP pairing decisions will go out during the first week of the quarter.
- Enrollment in 499B LURAP units will begin once pairing decisions have been announced.
Contact
- For questions about LURAP, please contact Prof. Myriam Lapierre, the LURAP coordinator, at mylapier@uw.edu
Spring 2024 application for undergraduate students
The Linguistics Department is pleased to announce that
a new round of applications is now open for LURAP for SPRING 2024!
- Deadline to apply: Wednesday, March 18, 2024.
- LURAP pairing decisions will go out in during the first week of the quarter.
Note: If you are were participating in LURAP for the WINTER 2024 quarter and would like to continue in the SPRING 2024 quarter, you MUST complete a NEW LURAP application (or respond to the email sent out to you).
COMPLETE THE APPLICATION HERE
Please use your @uw.edu email account
(Returning LURAP students must also re-apply for their project)
DESCRIPTIONS OF RESEARCH PROJECTS ACCEPTING NEW APPLICATIONS IN SPRING 2024
Role of early input on Deaf bilingual language development
Qi Cheng
Tu'un Savi Dictionary Project
Andrew Hedding
Eye-tracking study for perception and production of consonant clusters
Yuan Chai
Muscogee Speech Corpus
Julia Mainzinger & Gina-Anne Levow
Benchmark NLP Datasets Collation, Documentation, and Evaluation for Italian Minority Languages
Christopher Haberland & Shane Steinert-Threlkeld
Investigating bilingual language control in sentence vs. lexical-level processing
Yoojin Oh & Qi Cheng
OTHER CURRENTLY ACTIVE RESEARCH PROJECTS
(not accepting applications from new applicants at this time)
The Role of Child-directed Speech in Language Acquisition for Indigenous Communities: A Case Study in Panãra
Jessamine Jeter, Naja Ferjan Ramírez & Myriam Lapierre
Phonetics and Prosody of Panãra Vowels
Ella De Falco & Myriam Lapierre #1
Excrescent Vowels in Panãra
Ella De Falco & Myriam Lapierre #2
Bias in Automatic Speech Recognition (Bias-in-ASR) Project
Alicia Wassink #1
Pacific Northwest English Study – Public Engagement Project
Alicia Wassink #2
Documentation & Description of the Panãra language: Processing field materials
Sunkulp Ananthanarayan & Myriam Lapierre #1
Documentation & Description of the Panãra language: Morphology and Semantics
Sunkulp Ananthanarayan & Myriam Lapierre #2
Sanmen Wu and Xinchang Wu
Jessica Luo & Myriam Lapierre
Field research on Yateé Zapotec
Yuan Chai #1
Acoustics of breathy and falsetto voices
Yuan Chai #2
The role of spectral energy in the perception of voice quality
Yuan Chai #3
Compounding in Sign Language
Yuting Zhang & Qi Cheng
JIPA Illustration of Triestin (Triestine Venetian)
Alessio Tosolini & Myriam Lapierre
Pre-aspiration and stop contrasts in Scottish Gaelic
Saiya Karamali & Myriam Lapierre
SparkLing development
Kaveri Sheth & Naja Ferjan Ramírez