Mentored Research Opportunities

Opportunities to Work on Research Projects with Faculty in Linguistics

Each semester, faculty members in the Department of Linguistics may offer internships to undergraduate students in projects that they are working on. This is a great opportunity for students to work closely with a faculty member (and in some cases graduate students) and to contribute to a faculty-led research program at a Research 1 institution. Below is a list of the internships that are currently available.

Faculty members occasionally have small funds available to offer students as compensation for time spent on the project. In some cases, students may also be able to earn independent study credit, with approval from the overseeing faculty member. Please ask the faculty member who is supervising the project about these opportunities. Students are also encouraged to consult faculty members about the possibility of applying for UROP funding to support the internship.

The Autistic Life and Language Project

The Autistic Life and Language (ALL) Project in the Department of Linguistics applies sociocultural linguistic frameworks to explore, ethnographically, the social lives of autistic people. We are seeking undergraduate researchers to help us with several sub-projects during the upcoming 2026-2027 academic year. For instance, our sub-project on accents and autism explores the experiences of autistic individuals who have adopted ways of speaking counter to normative expectations, asserting that this practice is agentive rather than unthinking. A second sub-project on romance and autism challenges the notion that autistic individuals suffer deficits around the expression of love, instead reflecting autistic lived experiences of their own underrecognized love languages. The research objective of both projects is to highlight the social complexities of autistic expression through an analysis of social media discourse. Selected undergraduate researchers will contribute to an ongoing research project in sociocultural linguistics and gain competence in using social scientific research methods. If you are interested in joining our team, please send 1-2 paragraphs expressing your particular interests and research strengths to Dr. Kira Hall at kira.hall@colorado.edu.

English assessments and prosody

Work with Prof. Laura Michaelis on English assessments and prosody. This project requires some proficiency with Praat and corpus methods. You will help extract instances of an English dialog act type, the assessment pattern (illustrated by THAT's good and That’s TRUE) from the Switchboard corpus of American English conversation Fisher corpus of spoken English, including all sound files, placing each instance in a Praat text grid for annotation. The project concerns variation in the stress patterns of assessments, deceptively simple creatures that help us learn about general linguistic patterns, just as fruit flies help geneticists! If interested, please contact Laura Michaelis.

Research projects in the Language, Development, and Cognition (LDC) Lab

Work with Prof. Bhuvana Narasimhan and her lab members on research in Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Past and ongoing projects investigate the development of spatial prepositions in English, word order choices in monolingual and bilingual speakers of English, Spanish, and Mandarin, and listener- and message-oriented communication in speakers, among others. We are looking for 1-2 motivated, conscientious students with excellent organizational skills to collect, transcribe, or analyze data and conduct literature surveys. Native speakers of any language are welcome (note: if you are a native speaker of Hindi or Tamil, you will also have the opportunity to transcribe and conduct research on Hindi or Tamil language corpora). Work is flexible, during the semester or the summer. If interested, please contact our lab coordinator, Kanupriya Kale, at our lab email address.

Research projects in the Phonetics Lab

Work with Prof. Rebecca Scarborough and her lab members on research on the production and perception of spoken language. Ongoing projects investigate different listener-directed clear speech strategies, word-specific phonetic variation, and the use of low-level pronunciation details (like vowel nasality) in perceiving words. We are currently focusing on English, French, and Portuguese, but are interested in exploring the languages you know too. We are looking for responsible and motivated students to help run experiments, develop stimuli, make acoustic measurements, and help with analysis. Students who have taken Ling 3100 and/or who have experience with Praat are especially encouraged to apply, as are students with less experience who are willing to learn. We are also interested in students with programming experience to help script experiments. Work is flexible, during the semester or the summer. If interested, please contact Rebecca Scarborough.