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Hello! I've been studying linguistics for four years now, first as an undergraduate at the University of Western Ontario (in Canada) and then at the University of Tours (in France), and now as a Master's student, also in France.
At the lab in Tours, we do a lot of work with both SLI and bilingualism, both of which greatly interest me (atypical language acquisition seems to really be where my interests lie, perhaps because I myself have a rather complicated linguistic history, having been born into a Hungarian-speaking family, but starting to learn English and French and the age of two, and losing my ability to speak Hungarian fluently...). I feel that generativism is the linguistic theory that is currently best at sorting out issues with bilingualism and SLI in terms of such things as computational complexity, etc., and it also just seems to make the most sense to me, reading the various theories and papers.
I'm still undecided on a precise subject for my Master's thesis (although I have a few ideas). That said, I would very much like to continue the ongoing work in Tours and work with Wh-questions (for which the class in Interrogatives in Child Language would be ideal). Although I've been studying linguistics for quite some time now, there are certain areas in which I know I'm lacking. Next year, I plan to move away from the "purely linguistics" Master's program and finish my Master's in the Cognition program, to help round out my areas of knowledge, taking biology and psychology classes, among others. This is the main reason why I would be thrilled to come to the egg - there are so many classes on the cognitive aspects of language, and even an introductory course to neurolinguistics! I feel like it would be such a worthwhile way to spend those two weeks, and would do my best and learn as much as possible.
On a side not, I would also like to request COST A33 funding (recommender: Laurie Tuller, The University of Tours).
Hopefully I've presented myself well... I sincerely hope that you will consider me for a position to attend the egg this summer, it would be a real honour, and I think a lot of fun, too!
Best regards,
Sarah Black |