PhD position on language acquisition, dialogue, semantics at Paris 7

Applicants are invited for a full time PhD post to work within the 10-year project Labaratory of Excellence (LabEx) "Empirical Foundations of Linguistics" ( http://www.labex-efl.org/). The candidate will work in Strand 4: Language representation and processing in a lifespan perspective.

The successful applicant, who will be based at the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (LLF), Université Paris-Diderot (Paris 7) (http://www.llf.cnrs.fr), should have qualifications in linguistics, computer science, or psycholinguistics at the Master's level or equivalent.

The thesis, which can be written in English, will involve research within a project developing a model of language acquisition that integrates parent-child interaction as part of the primary data. The empirical basis will be corpus studies of multimodal child-parent interaction. Modelling will involve developing techniques that integrate dialogue modelling and machine learning as the basis for a theory of how grammar emerges at the very early stages of language acquisition. Research will also involve development of grammars for early child utterances and induction algorithms that will allow such grammars to change on the basis of interactions. The applicant will be working in an international interdisciplinary research team.

Applicants will be assessed by committee from the LabEx EFL. The main emphasis of the assessment will be on the applicant's potential for research, as evident from: Master's thesis or other equivalent scholarly works.

Please attach with your application:

• letter of application
• CV
• two names of referees (with email address)
• web address with publications.

Contact: Jonathan Ginzburg
Contact email: yonatan.ginzburg at univ-paris-diderot.fr.
Duration:36 months starting september 2012
Salary: in accordance with the French state regulated PhD salary scale
Application deadline: 10/04/2012
Application email: thierry.nazzi_at_parisdescartes.fr
Application reference: EFL-OLA8

For more information, see http://www.labex-efl.org/?q=en/hiring/ola8, or contact Jonathan Ginzburg. Interested ILLC students can contact Raquel Fernandez at raquel.fernandez at uva.nl.