Fundamental and Computational Linguistics

Researchers from the Centre for Language and Brain at HSE University, in collaboration with international colleagues, have shown that by the end of first grade, children have already developed an important eye-movement skill for reading. Like adults, they quickly adapt the length of their saccades—rapid eye movements—to the length of words in sentences. However, children’s gazes tend to land near the beginnings of words, whereas adults tend to target areas closer to the centres of words. The more fluent the reading, the closer saccadic targeting is to the word centre. The study findings have been published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

HSE University’s online course ‘Experimental Linguistics’ has won an award from the Global MOOC and Online Education Alliance (GMA). The university’s initiative was the only Russian programme to receive an award in the competition.

Researchers at the HSE Centre for Language and Brain have presented RusLan-M, an open multimedia corpus that makes it possible to trace the development of early child speech in Russian from first words to the emergence of complex grammatical constructions. The database contains around 41 hours of video recordings and more than 35,000 child utterances. The new resource will help researchers study more precisely how children acquire Russian and, in the longer term, develop more reliable tools for assessing speech development. The study has been published in Language Resources and Evaluation.

The Linguistic Convergence Laboratory and the School of Linguistics at HSE University have created corpora of the Abkhaz-Adyghe languages spoken in the Western Caucasus. The corpora serve as valuable resources for studying these languages with their unique features and demonstrate the potential for their modern use. The corpora were developed through a series of field expeditions to the Caucasus conducted by HSE University researchers and students, combined with modern linguistic processing methods and collaboration with colleagues from regional universities. In this interview with the HSE News Service, Yury Lander, Leading Research Fellow at the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory and Associate Professor at the School of Linguistics, discusses the work of linguists.