Shari Speer, professor and chair, linguistics, along with Laura Wagner, associate professor, psychology, and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, assistant professor, linguistics, were awarded a $60,000 Engagement Impact Grant from Ohio State's Office of University Outreach and Engagement for their project, The Science of Language: Using Language Sciences to Promote Science Education at COSI. Partners on this project include the College of Arts and Sciences and the Center of Science and Industry (COSI).

The Science of Language project seeks to expand an existing research and science education project taking place in the "language pod" laboratory at COSI. The language pod is one of three working research laboratories created through a partnership between COSI and Ohio State and staffed by Ohio State researchers that enable museum visitors to witness and participate in actual scientific research.

“This is language science outreach in a highly innovative and successful informal science institution,” said Speer. “Because so many children and their parents visit COSI from all over Ohio and the country, we have unique possibilities for teaching and research."

Inside the “language pod,” faculty from Ohio State’s Buckeye Language Network (BLN) conduct state-of-the-art research on how people acquire and represent language mentally, how language is produced and understood in real-time, and how it contributes to reasoning about social patterns of language use.

Ohio State students make this an interactive enterprise by engaging with COSI visitors outside of the “pod” to demonstrate concepts from the science of language through the use of portable exhibits and several research ‘toys’ created collaboratively by BLN members. The demonstrations provide accessible, interactive illustrations of concepts, ranging from basic physical and biological facts about speech to complex phenomena such as how language conveys meaning from one mind to another.

The Science of Language project will provide Ohio State students the opportunity to share the excitement of scientific explanation with COSI visitors, who in turn will be able to observe research in progress, participate in actual studies, and learn about the interpretation of research results.

Speer is primary investigator for the Psycholinguistics Laboratory in the Department of Linguistics. The laboratory conducts research on the role of prosody in language comprehension and production (prosody refers to stress, rhythm, and intonation in spoken sentences and discourse). The majority of laboratory research involves experiments with adult listeners who participate in language production, head-mounted eyetracking, and a variety of reaction-time tasks.

Wagner is steering committee chair for the BLN. Her research focuses on how children acquire language, and in particular, how they learn about meaning. Her work has looked at various dimensions of meaning, including children's understanding of temporal and event semantics (especially the linguistic category of aspect), and their understanding of social indexical meanings coded in dialect and register.

Campbell-Kibler is a linguist, specializing in sociolinguistics. Her interests include language variation, with an emphasis on the role of the listener in variation; language and sexuality; language and the construction of masculinity; and the role of language in the formation and performance of identity.

Ohio State’s Buckeye Language Network is a consortium of language researchers from 16 different departments across the university. The goal of the network is to encourage collaboration and foster language-related initiatives in research, curriculum and service.