Undergraduate Research Opportunities

Our faculty members regularly provide a number of research opportunities for undergraduate students. Some are for single terms, while others require two terms or more. Some are available to any interested student, while others are only open to majors in the department. Some are strictly extracurricular, while others may include the possibility of receiving academic credit.

This page provides information on commonly available research opportunities. Interested students should meet with faculty to discuss various possibilities.

At Dartmouth we have an outstanding faculty who are committed to their research and the insights it brings to all parts of their professional life. Creative ideas help generate new knowledge and new research directions, and help encourage students to think beyond the textbook. To this end, Dartmouth's Office of Undergraduate Research administers several forms of funding to support research and discovery. Click on the link above to find out more about these resources.

Below is a list of recent linguistics students who received research funding through programs administered by UGAR. UGAR also oversees the Mellon Mays Scholarships.

Junior Research Scholars

• "The impact of African American slang on Jamaican slang" (w/Prof. Stanford): Laura Logan '22
• "Modeling the relationship between tone and melody in Seenku vocal music" (w/Prof. McPherson): Lex Kang '23
• "Automation of rhoticity analysis" (w/Prof. Stanford): Sarah Gupta '19

Dartmouth Sophomore Research Scholar

• "Na variation in southwest China: Data analysis" (w/Prof. Stanford): Victoria Xu '23
• "Raciolinguistic perceptions of African American Language and phenotypes" (w/Prof. Stanford & Prof. Wray): Akiah Watts '22
• "Developing a multimedia dictionary of Seenku, an endangered Mande language of Burkina Faso" (w/Prof. McPherson): Katie McCabe' 21
• "Analyzing the relationship between language and music in the Sembla xylophone surrogate language" (w/Prof. McPherson): Gabriel Zuckerberg '20

Senior Fellowship

• "Montessori education in Hupa language communities" (w/Prof. McPherson): Muriel Ammon '21
• "Three Fires verbal morphology" (w/Prof. McPherson): Corinne Kasper '17

Dartmouth Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship

• "A sociolinguistic study of the vowel systems of African American English in Albany, NY" (w/Prof. Stanford): George Stain '23
• "Language and identity among Native American communities" (w/Prof. Stanford): Zachary Cooper '17

Dartmouth Stamps Scholarship

• "Bilingual acquisition by Cantonese speakers of English" (w/Prof. McPherson): Brandon Zhou '22
• "Electroglottography and tonal Zapotec languages" (w/Prof. Stanford): Emily Grabowski '18

Other Undergraduate Research Grants through UGAR:

• "The presence of syllable-stress in Dinka, a monosyllabic tone language" Waterhouse Independent Research Grant (Leave Term grant), 2024 (w/Mirella Blum): Maria Eduarda Gonçalves Freitas '26
• "Leveraging language materials with modern computational analysis" Undergraduate leave-term research, 2024 (w/Prof. Peterson): Luka Faccini Zanon '25
• "Phonemic alignment and vocal tract annotation" Gerstner Scholars, 2024-2025 (w/Prof Wray): Presley Coon '25
• "Zoom dysmorphia: An eye-tracking study of self-view and attention during video calls" Undergraduate Advising & Research Grant, 2023-2024 (w/Prof. Wray): Kathleen Stimson '24
• "Abenaki language revitalization and the Northeast Indigenous Language Archive" Dartmouth John L. Murphy Family Fund Award, 2012 (w/Prof. Stanford): Bonita Langle '13

The James O. Freedman Presidential Scholar Research Assistantship program is a Dartmouth-wide opportunity made available to all juniors who are in the top 40% of their class after their sophomore fall. The assistantship is two terms in length, and students selected into the program are expected to work 7-12 hours per week on their assistantship. A small stipend is provided and the possibility of academic credit exists. 

Faculty in the Department of Linguistics frequently make assistantships available through this program. Below are some recent offerings and recent scholars:

• "The presence of syllable-stress in Dinka, a monosyllabic tone language" (w/Mirella Blum): Maria Eduarda Gonçalves Freitas '26
• "Phonemic prediction and surprisal in nonconcatenative languages: An MEG analysis" (w/Prof. Wray): Hannah Brooks '23
• "Database on comparative Kuki-Chin grammar" (w/Prof. Peterson): Aleksa Sotirov '26
• "Computational analysis of F3 in the low-back merger in New England" (w/Prof. Stanford): Lizzy Hanson '25
• "Expanding the parsing of Bribri via Universal Dependencies (w/Prof. Coto): V. Quidore '24
• "Fieldwork and sociophonetic features of Manchester, New Hampshire" (w/Prof. Stanford): Abigail Schaefer '23
• "Speech, song, and surrogacy in archival recordings of Sambla music from Burkina Faso" (w/Prof. McPherson): Hannah Spindler '23
• "Bilingual documentation of Seenku, a language of Burkina Faso" (w/Prof. McPherson): Sarah Wen '22
• "Linguistic structures of musical surrogate languages" (w/Prof. McPherson): Jasmine Li '23
• "Information storage and retrieval for bilinguals in different linguistic domains" (w/Prof. Wray): Ruji "Lucy" Shao '23
• "Computational analysis of low-back merger in New England" (w/Prof. Stanford): Sarah Karnes '23
• "Database on comparative Kuki-Chin grammar" (w/Prof. Peterson): Gabriel Gilbert '23
• "New England sociophonetic analysis" (w/Prof. Stanford): Angela Burns '22
• "A pilot study of tonal acquisition in West African languages" (w/Prof. McPherson): Heavenly Zheng '21
• "New England English variation" (w/Prof. Stanford): James King '21
• "Acoustic and computational analysis of dialect data" (w/Prof. Stanford): Craig Wilcox '21
• "Towards a typology of musical surrogate systems" (w/Prof. McPherson): Lucas James '21
• "Sociolinguistic research using computational methods: tone analysis, speech recognition, and smartphone applications" (w/Prof. Stanford): Sean Hawkins '20
• "New England English dialects" (w/Prof. Stanford): Isabelle Strong '19
• "Development of materials for Rengmitca" (w/Prof. Peterson): Dat Vo '19
• "Development of materials for Khumi" (w/Prof. Peterson): Olivia Estes '19
• "Automatizing sociolinguistic data collection and crowd-sourcing" (w/Prof. Stanford): Chaeyoon Kim '18
• "Seenku language research" (w/Prof. McPherson): Maggie Baird '18
• "Computational sociolinguistiuc methods" (w/Prof. Stanford): Ben Packer '17
• "Documenting languages of West Africa" (w/Prof. McPherson): Ksenia Ryzhova '17
• "Jordanian Arabic Field Research" (w/Prof. Stanford): Jordan Kastrinsky '16
• "Computational Modeling in Sociolinguistics" (w/Prof. Stanford): Sarah Young '16
• "Development of materials for Khumi and Rengmitca" (w/Prof. Peterson): Kelsey Sipple '16
• "Development of materials for Mru" (w/Prof. Peterson): Grant Schutzman '16
• "Acoustic and instrumental phonetic analysis" (w/Prof. McPherson): Rebecca Schantz '16
• "French Language Variation along the Quebec/New Hampshire Border" (w/Prof. Stanford): Leslie Fink '16
• "Perception of traditional New England dialect features in northern New England" (w/Prof. Stanford): Hannah Perry '15
• "Development of materials for Mru" (w/Prof. Peterson): Cali Digre '14
• "Vector-space methods for machine translation" (w/Prof. Reddy): James Brofos and Steven Nugent '15
• "New England dialects and culture: Generational changes on a maple syrup farm" (w/Prof. Stanford): Erin Landau '15
• "Development of materials for Cak" (w/Prof. Peterson): Abigail Bard '14
• "Computational analysis of dialect features" (w/Prof. Stanford and Prof. Reddy): Ian Stewart '14
• "Eastern New England dialect changes" (w/Prof. Stanford): Leah Nicolich-Henkin '12
• "Variation and change in Cherokee language immersion programs" (w/Prof. Stanford): Gregory Buzzard '12
• "Dialect features in the transition zone between eastern and western New England" (w/Prof. Stanford): Jill Tetirick '11
• "Moroccan Arabic in multilingual online interactions" (w/Prof. Stanford): Chelsea Stewart '12
• "Sociophonetics and gender" (w/Prof. Stanford): Natalie Schrimpf '12
• "Acoustic investigation of consonant-glide- vowel sequences in two Romance languages" (w/Prof. Chitoran): Lauren Loehlein '05 and Nathan Saperia '05
• "Acoustic study of Dholuo consonants" (w/Prof. Chitoran) Rachael Degenshein '04 
• "Discourse analysis of Oroqen Folklore texts" (w/Prof. Whaley): Scott Anderson '05
• "The typology of antipassives" (w/Prof. Peterson)
• "A Cross-Linguistic Examination of Quantifier Float" (w/Prof. Whaley)
• "Cross-linguistic study of stress and vowel height interaction" (w/Prof. Chitoran)
• "Discourse analysis of medical information on the Internet" (w/Prof. Glinert)
• "Ethical Issues of the Internet" (w/Prof. Moor)

Linguistics students have worked on research projects with Dartmouth faculty funded by the Neukom Scholars program. Neukom-funded projects involve computational methods. Here are some recent examples:

• "Pioneering Word Embeddings for the Aja Language: Development and Insights" (w/Prof. Coto & Prof. McPherson): Josue Godeme '17
• "Automatic speech recognition for sociophonetic vowel analysis" (w/Prof. Stanford): Yuanhao Chen '25
• "Sociophonetics of nasality in "gay-sounding" speech" Dartmouth Neukom Scholar, 2023-24 (w/Prof. Stanford): Griffin Dagger Bishop '24
• "Fieldwork and sociophonetic features of Manchester, New Hampshire" (w/Prof. Stanford): Abigail Schaefer '23
• "Neural networks/deep learning for automated sociophonetic coding" (w/Prof. Stanford): Anthony DiPadova '19
• "ATLAS: Automated Tone Level Annotation System" (w/Prof. McPherson): Emily Grabowski '18
• "Dialect features of South Boston" (w/Prof. Stanford): Kelsey Sipple '16
• "Linguistic variation on social media" (w/Prof. Reddy): Joy Zhong '15
• "Automated classification of non-native English writing" (w/Prof. Reddy): Crystal Ye '14
• "Online interactive games for Abenaki language learning" (w/Prof. Stanford): Bonita Langle '13, Shloka Kini '13, Aaron Ellis '15
• "Computational modeling of dialect interaction and change" (w/Prof. Stanford): Laurence Kenny '11

WISP (Women in Science Project) administers several funding opportunities that Linguistics students can use.

• "Computational approaches to bilingualism" (w/Prof. Wray) Alexandra Kaonohiokalani Perry '26

Linguistic Discovery (LD) is an open-access electronic journal edited by Lindsay Whaley. The journal's aim is to present original research on language structures. The orientation of this research may be either descriptive or theoretical, but all papers in LD contain significant empirical data that are unavailable or hard to access in published sources.

Editorial assistants are hired regularly to assist with the preparation of manuscripts that are scheduled to appear in LD. Interested students should contact Professor Whaley.

Independent research for credit may be carried out by students as a single-term independent study course (Linguistics 85) or as a two-term senior honors thesis (Linguistics 86-87). Interested students should approach individual faculty members to serve as advisors for such projects, although the projects must be approved by the Linguistics Department.