Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

Our Hispanic Linguistics program at The Pennsylvania State University zranks among the strongest in the nation. We have major strengths in bilingualism and language contact, areas in which all of our faculty work from distinct perspectives and which connect to other language researchers at Penn State. Our faculty encourage excellence in scientific research by engaging in collaborative projects with students and other scholars here and abroad that examine questions related to dialectology, language contact and language variation, as well as the linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of bilingualism.

 

Over the past several years, many of our faculty and graduate students in our program have received external funding, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and National Institutes of Health. We have an outstanding placement record, both in tenure track positions and, recently, in post-doctoral appointments of the kind not traditionally available to Spanish PhD students. This success is a direct reflection of the national visibility of our faculty and of the cutting-edge research we are pursuing.

 

Our faculty also play a central role in the cross-disciplinary Center for Language Science (http://lsrg.psu.edu/about.shtml), and the increasing methodological sophistication of our experimental research, including work in eye-tracking and planned developments in neuro-imaging, provides a transformative model for Hispanic Linguistics programs.

 

Cooperating Faculty

J.-Marc Authier -Linguistics and Applied Language Studies: syntax; semantics; pragmatics; mathematical linguistics; philosophy or language.

 

Philip Baldi - Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies: historical linguistics; indo-European; the history of Latin; morphology.

 

Barbara Bullock - French: Romance linguistics; French phonology, morphology, and sociolinguistics.

 

Carrie Jackson - German and Slavic Languages: Second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, sentence processing.

 

Judith Kroll - Psychology: psycholinguistics; bilingualism; cognitive psychology

 

Ping Li - Psychology: Cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, bilingualism, computational and neural mechanisms of language acquisition.

 

Adele Miccio - Communication Sciences and Disorders: normal and disordered phonological acquisition.

 

Richard Page - German and Slavic Languages: German linguistics; historical linguistics; phonology; language change.

 

Pilar Piñar - (Gallaudet University) Visiting scholar: Gesture and sign language research, bilingualism and second language acquisition, sentence processing and literacy.

 

Dan Weiss - Psychology: Language acquisition, Statistical learning, Comparative cognition and communication with nonhuman primates.

 

Lisa Reed - French: theoretical linguistics; syntax and semantics of French.

 

Janet van Hell - Psychology: Second language learning and bilingualism/multilingualism; language development in children with a typical or atypical language development (children who are deaf, children with dyslexia, with SLI, and bilingual children from an ethnic minority background).

 

Research Facilities

The University Libraries comprise a central collection and seven branch libraries at the University Park campus, and libraries at twenty-two other Penn State locations. At University Park, Pattee Library houses the Arts and Humanities Library, with extensive holdings in literature and linguistics, the Extended Hours Reading Room, featuring Reserves and Microforms, and the Gateway Commons, featuring electronic resources. State-of-the-art multimedia and research facilities are also available at the Center for Language Acquisition.

 

Admission Requirements

Applicants must hold a baccalaureate degree (BA) from an accredited institution. Students applying for graduate study in Spanish should have the equivalent of an undergraduate Spanish major. The GRE is required of applicants educated in the continental United States. The TOEFL (minimum score 550 for the paper version, 213 for the computer version) is required of all international students for whom English is not a first language, or who do not hold a baccalaureate or master's degree from an institution whose language of instruction is English.

Students entering with a master's degree should contact the department for specific requirements. For more information on Admissions please visit the Admission Requirements page for MA/PhD program.

 

Financial Assitance

Most graduate students in the Department hold teaching assistantships, for which they receive a stipend and a grant-in-aid which covers full University tuition. For those who do not, there are several sources of financial aid in the form of grants, fellowships, scholarships, etc. Applications for teaching assistantships should be made directly to the head of the department before January 15 for the following academic year. Students interested in being considered for fellowship support should apply no later than January 15.