Linguistics in Clinical Research

Overview

Key Features

The studies greatly deepen the students’ understanding of how language works and deal with issues important to Israeli society, including first and second language acquisition, the cognitive and neural basis of reading acquisition and dyslexia, language assessment in multilingual societies, linguistics characteristics of psychiatric disorders, sign language linguistics, and more.

The Linguistics in Clinical Research program from Bar Ilan University includes courses in general linguistics meant to provide the student with a solid foundation in areas such as phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and psycholinguistics; as well as advanced courses and seminars in specific research areas, such as the acquisition of morphology, syntax and semantics, language and schizophrenia, language and autism, language and reading disorders, specific language impairment, and bilingualism. Students who are interested in performing independent research may choose research topics that integrate their previous knowledge with the linguistic knowledge that they acquire, making use of the areas of expertise of the faculty members in the department. 

Some of the topics of research of our former students: linguistic characteristics of stories told by bilingual children with developmental language impairments, understanding logical relations and questions in autism, the acquisition of reading and vocabulary in Arabic, Russian-Hebrew bilinguals' syntactic understanding in Russian, and more.

The language of instruction in the department is English; courses in adjunct departments (Brain Sciences, Psychology, Education) are in Hebrew. Students who do not have full control of academic English are encouraged to apply. Our faculty all do advising in Hebrew, and students' research has dealt with English, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and other languages.