Staff in the Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies (LMS) are actively conducting research on a variety of topics. A central theme that runs through much of this research is bilingualism and multilingualism.
As the name Linguistics and Multilingual Studies suggests, the faculty of the division work not only on the structural aspects of language, but with a focus on the study of the languages of multilingual individuals and of multilingual societies. Research in the division is geared towards a deepening of our understanding of multilingualism through empirical studies of topics such as language description and documentation, language contact, loanword phonology, machine translation, language maintenance and shift, and multilingual language processing and acquisition.
Singapore, which is characterized by the widespread practice of bilingualism and multilingualism, is therefore a prime focus of the faculty's research. In addition to that, faculty members also work on language issues in countries that are of special relevance to Singapore such as China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam, amongst others.
Major Research Areas
Child Language
Computational Linguistics
Conversation Analysis
Language Attitudes and Identity
Language Contact
Language Description, Documentation and Typology
Language Maintenance and Language Shift
Language Planning and Policy
Phonology and Speech Prosody
Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics
Semantics
The Division encourages students to get involved in the research projects conducted by the LMS staff.