NSF awards research grant to Dr. Koulidobrova

The National Science Foundation awarded Associate Professor of Linguistics Dr. Helen Koulidobrova and her colleagues nearly $300,000 in grant funds for a project titled “Advancing Open-Access Resources for Languages: Investigating evidentiality and focus features.” Working in collaboration with the University of Illinois-Chicago and several Indigenous communities in Peru, Koulidobrova's lab will analyze several syntactic properties of two indigenous languages of South America: Cuzco Quechua and Shipibo and build detailed language databases that help computers understand languages more generally. 

The grant also will allow for collaboration with and provide training for community researchers and students at Central. The project builds on previous NSF-funded research that allowed Koulidobrova and her colleagues to document Quechua and Shipibo using a questionnaire targeting information access, beliefs, prevention methods, and treatment during the Covid-19 pandemic.