The Language Commons is an extensive project that has come together over the last year to bring together the very large and diverse group of faculty and students who are engaged on the I.U. campus in research on language with the coordination and support of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Commons has come together.
The Commons is, at this point, two things. First, it is a place that facilitates research development. There are two components to the space. First is the commons facility itself on the 4th floor of Morrison Hall. This is an open and flexible space for individuals and for meeting one another that opened at the beginning of this semester. With little fanfare, beyond a gathering of interested people at the end of January, it has collected a steady stream of people, from 3 – 5 people at most times during the day, to assortments of 20 – 30 in the middle of the week. It’s an ideal space for this, and you can go at most times during the week and find people doing individual research for extended periods of time, or groups collaborating on projects, or students gathering for professional discussion. Or groups meetings for various labs or reading groups. Or, as is most typical, some of these at the same time.
The second part of the facility is a set of seven labs, which are currently being constructed, mostly on the first floor of Morrison Hall. These labs are focused on all aspects of language performance, including speech production, acoustics, and perception, as well as supporting experimentation on processing and encoding. The first of these is a recording facility with a sound-treated booth, which is just now being opened. Other facilities will come online as the relevant equipment is collected and assembled.
What drives the activity of the commons is the other thing that the Commons is, and that is people. Colleagues who have worked together on language research from so many different perspectives have agreed to be involved with developing and filling the commons facility, and ones involved particularly in experimental research have been designated as Language Commons Research Fellows. This cohort gives some idea of the size and breadth of this strand of language research here at I.U. Fellows currently come from seven different departments, and involve experts in speech production, signal processing, hearing and speech perception, and in language processing. Linguistic phenomena of interest also vary, from language documentation and description, to computational linguistics, to disorders and clinical interventions, to language learning and bilingualism. These scholars comprise one of the largest and most active bodies of language scholars collected on a single campus, and the Commons holds promise of bringing us all together to help exchange ideas and expertise, and to support the training of world-class researchers in all aspects of linguistic performance.
For more information on the Commons, please contact Ken de Jong, Director of the Language Commons kdejong@iu.edu
The College of Arts