Tag «linguistics»

Linguatest, Russia’s first foreign-language certification system, has been launched in the Nizhny Novgorod region. The system was developed by specialists from HSE University in cooperation with the National Accreditation Agency and the Prosveshchenie group of companies, who are providing certification and publishing support for the project. Nizhny Novgorod is the first city after Moscow to offer testing under the system.

Austin Garrett-Sites, from the US, is a master's student of the Applied Linguistics and Text Analytics programme in Nizhny Novgorod. Students from around the world to come to Russia to get a European education in English with viable employment prospects. Austin spoke about his impressions after the first year of study and his favourite places in Nizhny Novgorod.

The IT industry is rapidly developing and incorporating new professions. Zoya Mazunina and Arina Mosyagina, linguists with Seldon and graduates of the HSE University Fundamental and Applied Linguistics programme, met with university applicants to talk about the computer linguist profession, issues of automatic language processing, and how linguists use the knowledge they gain at HSE University.

The Centre for Language and Brain in Nizhny Novgorod started operations in September 2020. Today, it is comprised of a team of linguists - teachers and students - who are researching the relations between speech and parts of the brain. The Director of the Centre, Natalya E. Gronskaya, spoke to the HSE Look about how the neuro-linguistic laboratory appeared in Nizhny Novgorod, as well as current tasks and prospects the Centre can offer the students and the region.

Psycholinguists from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain found that when reading, people are not only able to predict specific words, but also words’ grammatical properties, which helps them to read faster. Researchers have also discovered that predictability of words and grammatical features can be successfully modelled with the use of neural networks. The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Moscow, like any modern big city, attracts migrants from different regions and countries. Some of them speak very little or no Russian. Their adaptation and successful integration depend in part on how fast they can learn Russian and in part on whether the city makes an effort to accommodate other languages. According to linguist Mira Bergelson, this latter factor is particularly important if the city is to benefit from immigration.

Neurolinguists from HSE University have confirmed experimentally that for people with aphasia, it is easier to retrieve verbs describing situations with several participants (such as ‘someone is doing something’), although such verbs give rise to more grammar difficulties. The results of the study have been published in Aphasiology.

Why might a grandmother and her grandson not understand each other? Why would linguists want to go to Dagestan? Is it possible to save the less commonly spoken languages of small nations and Russian dialects? Nina Dobrushina, Head of the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory answered these questions in an interview with HSE News Service.