 |
|
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||
|
|
 |
 |
 |
|
What are the Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences? The cognitive and linguistic sciences
offer a multidisciplinary study of the mind or what might be called
"natural intelligence." Cognitive science seeks an understanding
of such mental abilities as perception, recognition, categorization,
memory, reasoning and problem-solving, motor control, speech, language,
and communication. Linguistics focuses on the nature of human language
- its theoretical, descriptive, behavioral, and evolutionary bases.
It also serves as a window into human cognition. The approaches of a
variety of disciplines, including cognitive psychology, linguistics,
artificial intelligence, neuroscience, philosophy, and anthropology,
are all brought to bear on common problems of mind, brain, and language.
|
|
Brown's Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences was formed in 1986, one of the first such departments in the country. The current chair is Bill Warren. The faculty includes people with backgrounds in cognitive psychology, theoretical and computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational neuroscience; many affiliated and related faculty are found in departments such as Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Psychology. This configuration of faculty offers unusually strong opportunities for within- and cross-disciplinary graduate study. For example, it is possible to combine formal training in theoretical linguistics with experimental research in psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, or language acquisition. Students apply neural network modeling techniques to empirical findings in perception, cognition, language, and speech. The vision group provides training in computational, psychophysical, and ecological approaches to perception and action, a combination unavailable elsewhere. The speech group encompasses experimental, developmental, neurolinguistic, and evolutionary perspectives on speech perception and production. Reinforcing the interdisciplinary nature of our program, the department has recently received three National Science Foundation Learning and Intelligent Systems grants. These projects involve collaborative research with investigators from Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, and Neuroscience. Topics include spatial learning in humans and robots, computational models of cortical processing, and structured stochastic networks for vision and language.. The department's Ph.D. program offers degrees in both Cognitive Science and Linguistics. The program is small, with about 20 graduate students in total, and the atmosphere is friendly and informal. The high faculty-student ratio promotes ongoing interaction between students and faculty. Graduate students learn to do research in an apprenticeship with one or more faculty members. Collaboration is encouraged, and students often work with associated faculty in Psychology, Computer Science, Philosophy, Neuroscience, or Biology and take courses in a variety of other departments. There is no separate Master's program, but students may choose to take a Master's degree en route to the Ph.D. The intellectual life of the department is lively and interactive. In addition to a departmental colloquium series, there are bag lunch groups on neural networks, vision, motor control, theoretical linguistics, neurolinguistics, and lexical access, as well as numerous research meetings. Other departments also offer colloquia and regular meetings on topics such as computer vision, visual neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and robotics. |
|
The Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences is located at 190 Thayer Street, across from Brown University's Sciences Library. Our mailing address is:
|
