LingLab: Experimental Linguistics Laboratory
The central hub of empirical and experimental linguistics and language science research at Newcastle University.
Enabling high-end linguistics research
The facilities associated with LingLab enable high-end linguistics research involving:
- acoustic analysis
- typical and atypical human language development and processing
- second language acquisition
- speech perception
- social interaction
- language variation and change
- reading behaviour
- lateralisation studies
It brings together staff and students from the Schools of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, English Literature, Language and Linguistics and Modern Languages. We also have ties to other schools and units across the University.
We recently received investment as part of the UKRI’s World Class Laboratories fund 2020-2021. This enabled us to upgrade our recording facilities to studio quality. We also purchased portable equipment for high-quality field and remote virtual research. Find out more about our LingLab.
Our links with the Bioscience Institute
Alongside our lab, our researchers also have access to psycholinguistic and neuro-physiological techniques that are available at the Bioscience Institute.
These include:
- electroencephalograms (EEG)
- functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
- magnetoencephalography (MEG)
- positron emission tomography (PET)
- further eyetracking and retinal imaging techniques
Our linguistic analyses are further supported by cloud servers and a High Power Computing (HPC) facility at Newcastle University. This enables researchers to run advanced statistical analyses that require more memory and resources than is typical.
The Lab is managed by Lauren Ackerman, who serves as a research support scientist for experimental and quantitative linguistics across ECLS, SELLL and SML.
For questions about LingLab, please email linglab@ncl.ac.uk.