Linguistics Research

Find out about the latest and ongoing research at our centre.

A list of projects by key contact

Key contact: Prof. Kearsy Cormier

EASIER is a Horizon 2020 (EU) project that aims to design, develop, and validate a complete multilingual machine translation system that will act as a framework for barrier-free communication among deaf and hearing individuals, as well as provide a platform to support sign language content creation.

This project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, aims to study how languages can start from scratch, and to see how the languages we know today could have gotten their rules and their rich structure, with focus on word order.

This project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, aims to document and describe word order and non-manual features in different types of BSL sentences, using the BSL Corpus.

This project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, aims to investigate how deaf signers of BSL mimetically reproduce the actions, utterances, thoughts and feelings of themselves, other people, animals and things, using existing conversation and personal narrative data in the BSL Corpus.

This project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, aims to study language attitudes and language awareness in the British Deaf community, using interview data from the BSL Corpus.

  • BSL SignBank

    BSL SignBank is DCAL's online British Sign Language dictionary, created from signs used in the BSL Corpus. Funding for creation of BSL SignBank finished in 2016 but work on the dictionary continues.

  • BSL Corpus Project

    The British Sign Language (BSL) Corpus is a large collection of video clips showing Deaf people using BSL, with metadata and ELAN annotations. Funding for creation of the BSL Corpus finished in 2011 but work on the corpus continues.

Key contacts: Prof. Kearsy Cormier and Prof. Bencie Woll

ExTOL, funded by the Engingeering and Physical Sciences Research Council, aims to take annotated sign language corpus data and to use this to build a system that is capable of watching a human signing and turning this into written English. In the process, this project will also create computer vision tools to assist with video analysis.

Key contact: Dr. Robert Adam

Australian Irish Sign Language (AISL) is a minority sign language within a minority sign language community brought to Australia from Ireland in 1875. Most signers are in their early 70s onwards and they number 100 although there may be younger Deaf & hearing native signers with Deaf parents.

Key contact: Prof. Bencie Woll

  • Bilingualism in deaf and hearing people: learning and neuroplastic processes

The studies involve the investigation of unimodal and bimodal bilingualism, examining both spoken and signed languages (Russian Sign Language and British Sign Language). A mix of linguistic, psycholinguistic and neuroscience approaches are used to address bilingualism in hearing and deaf people - specifically, the effects of modality on language learning and language processing - by exploring the differences between learning a second language in the same modality compared to learning a second language in a new modality.

This British Academy Special Research Project is part of the British Academy's initiative to deepen awareness and demonstrate the importance of languages. This project is concerned with language learning in relation to cognitive function across the lifespan, including modern and community language education, language skills, employment/ability, community cohesion, and public policy, and explores cross-curriculum and cross-societal benefits to individuals and various SEC groups.