PhD - Doctor in Philosophy in Centre for Language and Communications Studies

Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin

The School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences offers five taught Masters programmes and a comprehensive range of doctoral research opportunities in the study of general and applied linguistics, speech sciences, speech and language pathology, clinical linguistics and Deaf studies. The School was formed in 2005 from three main constituents: The Centre for Language and Communication Studies; the School of Clinical Speech and Language Studies; and the Centre for Deaf Studies.

The Centre for Language and Communication Studies, founded in 1979, is a centre of research in linguistics, applied linguistics, phonetics and speech science, and provides teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The Centre offers four integrated taught Masters Degrees in Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, English Language Teaching and Speech and Language Processing.

The Centre offers many opportunities for doctoral research. In linguistics students have conducted research on a diverse range of languages and in fields including language acquisition, computational linguistics (in collaboration with the School of Computer Science and Statistics), sociolinguistics, pragmatics, semantics, phonology, syntax, language planning, corpus linguistics, and language typology and universals. In applied linguistics doctoral supervision is available in areas such as autonomy in second/foreign language learning; bilingualism; language transfer; learner strategies and communicative strategies; media and technologies in language learning; metacognition and metalinguistic awareness; pragmatics and language learning; syllabus, learning materials and pedagogical grammar; the age factor in language learning; and the L2 mental lexicon. Research in applied linguistics has informed the activities of two campus companies of Trinity College: Authentic Language Learning Resources Ltd, which publishes language learning materials and books for language teachers, and Integrate Ireland Language and Training Ltd, which from 2001 to 2008 was funded by the Department of Education and Science to provide English language training for adult refugees and to support teachers of English as a second language to immigrant pupils in schools.

Funded research in the Phonetics and Speech lab has included a range of projects. Three current strands are: (1) the analysis and modelling of voice quality, with particular interest in how the voice source as a basic dimension of prosody is exploited both for linguistic purposes and for the paralinguistic communication of emotion and attitude, (2) the study of the prosody of Irish dialects and of different varieties of Irish English, (3) text-to-speech development for Irish and for Irish English. Researchers in the lab have been active in the development of prerequisites for the text-to-speech synthesis of Irish.

The Department of Clinical Speech and Language Studies is the longest established area for the education of speech and language therapists in Ireland. Two primary research areas within the department are communication in typical and atypical contexts, with particular emphasis on the social experience of communication difficulties and dysphagia (swallowing disorders). At postgraduate level, the department offers a range of research opportunities leading to the award of higher degrees (M.Sc., M.Litt., Ph.D.).

This program based on Centre for Language and Communications Studies (Doctoral) degree.