labs and institutes

Research Institute for the Study of Language in an Urban Society

The Institute conducts research on language, literacy, and bilingualism and their development and acquisition in an urban society. The central mission of RISLUS is to investigate those research questions that are at the nexus between language and the New York City urban environment.

Psycholinguistics Laboratory

CUNY’s Psycholinguistics Lab undertakes experimental studies of human sentence processing, with an emphasis on cross-linguistic research. Its facilities supporting on- and off-site data collection are made available to students and faculty pursuing individual and collaborative projects. Several current projects focus on the syntax-prosody interface.

Second Language Acquisition Lab

The CUNY Second Language Acquisition Lab is the center for study of language acquisition at the Graduate Center. Its main objective is to conduct cross-linguistic research on the acquisition of non-primary languages in children and adults, comparing it to first language acquisition so as to discover universal characteristics of language development as well as differences between primary and non-primary language acquisition. The SLA lab is both a research and a teaching lab. Students interested in language acquisition have the opportunity to participate in grant-funded research projects and to conduct studies of their own under the supervision of one of the directors, Professor Elaine Klein or Professor Gita Martohardjono.