课程简介
Studying for your PhD in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies means that you'll become an expert in a specialist area and develop high-quality research skills, which will prepare you for further research projects in addition to pursuing specialist career paths. As a postgraduate researcher, you'll conduct original research work under the guidance of your supervisors. You'll have regular meetings to monitor your progress and develop an initial training plan to make sure you are acquiring the appropriate skills for your research. Your initial priority is refining a research plan and establishing a feasible timescale for your project. During the early part of your PhD, you'll undertake a range of research methods modules to support your research activities. For your first year (or 18 months if you are part-time) you'll be enrolled as a provisional postgraduate reseaarcher, you'll develop a detailed research proposal and write a literature review. This work is submitted to a panel of examiners who will assess it and provide you with feedback and advice on the progress of your research. This is called 'transfer' which is an important means of monitoring the progress of your work and assessing whether your proposal has enough weight to be accurately explored through a PhD research path. After successful transfer, you'll enrol as a full postgraduate researcher, complete your research and write a thesis of approximately 100,000 words. The degree of Doctor of Philosophy is awarded on the basis of this thesis, and your viva voce, where you'll present and discuss the rationale, methods and findings of your original study with an examining panel.<br><br>We study first language acquisition, bilingual acquisition (in children and adults) and second language acquisition (in children and adults). Our research focuses on: Development of inferencing abilities, Developmental pragmatics, Interplay between language acquisition and cognitive development (e.g. the cognitive underpinnings of linguistic categories, the executive function correlates of bilingualism), Acquisition of pronouns (clitic pronouns, resumptive pronouns) and coreference (especially anaphora), Acquisition of referring expressions, Acquisition of adjectives, Bilingual and L2 speech development, Protracted L1 effects in very advanced second language learners, Individual variation in first and second language acquisition and in impaired populations, Socio-economic determinants of language acquisition, Quantifying language experience in bilingual children and Implicit acquisition vs. explicit learning of a second language.
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