The REU Site will be housed within the Department of Linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, the largest college of the University of Oregon. The REU Site is run by Dr. Pérez Báez and Dr. Baese-Berk. Both have extensive experience supervising undergraduate student research, including honors theses and REU student research for NSF projects. Our program manager, Shayleen EagleSpeaker, is happy to help answer any question about the REU Site.
Dr. Pérez Báez
Dr. Gabriela Pérez Báez directs the Language Revitalization Lab and co-directs the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages. In this role, she has worked with community researchers in the United States to support archive-based research for language revitalization. Gabriela’s research focuses on linguistic diversity and strategies to sustain it. She has worked to document, analyze and revitalize Zapotec languages in her native Mexico and was the lead compiler of the La Ventosa Diidxazá Lexico-botanical Dictionary with over 1000 specialized entries and multimedia assets.
Spike Gildea is Professor of linguistics at the University of Oregon, where he has taught since 2000. He has worked overseas in multiple countries (Nepal, Brazil, Guyana, Australia, France) and has worked with speakers of multiple Native languages in South America. In linguistics, he specializes in language description and documentation, historical linguistics, and linguistic typology. He has also dedicated much of his time to initiatives to encourage language revitalization via the full participation of speech community members in all phases of linguistic work. He helped to create the series of summer Collaborative Language Research Institutes (CoLang) and has taught in every one since they began in 2008, since 2015 he has served on the Advisory Board of the Northwest Indian Language Institute (NILI), and he has worked closely with four Native PhD students, two as Advisor and two as a member of their PhD committees.
Dr. Gildea
Shayleen EagleSpeaker
Shayleen EagleSpeaker (Wasco/Warm Springs/Yakama) is a doctoral student at the UO Linguistics Department. She is also a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Oregon and the REU Site program manager for the academic year 2022-23. Her research in linguistics is focused on community-based research for language revitalization purposes. Her specific interests are analysis and description of the Chinookan and Ichishkiin languages of the Pacific Northwest, with a focus on morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, and Indigenous methodologies.
What We Do
All kinds of linguistic research projects are being done here at the UO Department of Linguistics. Language is one of the most central aspects of human experience. The question is “how does it work?” One way you could get the answer to this question is to ask native speakers to explain what they know when they know a language. Another way is to put native speakers’ knowledge to test in a controlled environment.
What we call “field linguistics” typically involves the description and documentation of language as native speakers use it. Field linguists work closely with native speakers to understand what speech sounds are used in the language, how words are put together to form meaningful sentences, how sentences are formed to create a longer discourse (like stories, conversations, or speech). Field linguists who work on Native American languages often deal with archival materials (historical documents, audio recordings, grammar sketches, dictionaries, or field notes).
Analyzing sound spectrogram
Working with archival materials
Comparing field notes
Experimental linguistics brings in the design of interesting tasks to test how humans react to different language inputs. Experimental linguists focus on hypothesis testing to draw general conclusions from a random sample of participants. For example, participants may be asked to fill in the blank: They ___ their way through the forest. We would predict that participants will use words like make, force, or pave, but not words like sneeze, sit, or huddle. Experimental linguists may also work with audio and video recordings, as well as eye-tracking equipment, depending on the tasks and the research question.
Student working with video and audio equipment
Eye-tracking equipment
Student research space