Member Spotlights

Study prompted by Commander Hadfield comment finds gravity affects astronauts’ speech

“Right after I landed, I could feel the weight of my lips and tongue and had to change how I was talking. I didn't realize I had learned to talk with a weightless tongue." Science has studied the effects of lower gravity on the body, but this comment by Commander Chris Hadfield at a press…

UBC launches professional computational linguistics degree to meet industry demand

Photo credit: Vanessa Ho

Computers can work out your bus journey – and predict dementia

Computers can map your route to work, automatically turn speech into written text - and predict very early stages of dementia with more than 80 per cent accuracy. Language Sciences members Giuseppe Carenini, professor of Computer Science, Hyeju Jang, Computer Science postdoctoral fellow, and…

Language Sciences’ statement on the climate strike

On Friday 27th September, a global climate strike will be held to highlight the climate crisis. UBC students have planned an event from 11am to 12pm at the AMS Student Nest. After the UBC event, there are plans for people on campus to travel by bus and bike convoys to Vancouver City Hall, where…

Language Sciences congratulates our award-winning members!

The Language Sciences Initiative would like to congratulate our members who have won a number of awards in recent months.  Department of Psychology senior instructor Steven Barnes won a 3M National Teaching Fellow award. According to the sponsors, the Fellowship recognizes university and…

Secret love letters and languages: UBC exhibit offers Pride Week history lesson

Learn about the history of B.C.’s Indigenous languages this month with the Xwi7xwa Library

June is National Indigenous History Month in Canada, and 2019 is the United Nations International Year of Indigenous Languages. British Columbia’s Indigenous languages make up more than 50% of the approximately 61 languages indigenous to Canada, according to the First Peoples’ Cultural…

Babies can learn link between language and ethnicity, study suggests

Looking behind the ‘model minority mask’ to help educationally at-risk multilingual students

Image credit: Paul H. Joseph The stereotype of the high-achieving Chinese student in Canada, called the ‘model minority’, can mask differences in learning within this community, and a lack of research in this area means educationally at-risk students are being overlooked. That is…

No, it’s not Skynet: you’ve (probably) encountered machine learning today

Machines that can learn have long been the stuff of science fiction, and questions about the possibility of killer robots come up often enough that Language Sciences member Mark Schmidt has a slide answering this in one of his presentations. As Canada Research Chair in Large-Scale Machine…