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Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf announces the launch of InterpNET, a resource database for educators and students in interpreter education programs, deafness-related organizations, and anyone interested in expanding their knowledge.

The university’s two newest Ph.D. programs in cognitive science and physics offer diverse research opportunities for students and help them gain the skills and abilities needed to analyze data and grasp complex concepts. The new programs bring RIT’s total doctoral programs to 15.

ScienceNews talks to Rain Bosworth, associate professor in the Department of Liberal Studies, about her research.

New research exploring how deaf and hearing preschool-aged children learn through interactive play with their parents is the focus of a partnership between RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf and The Strong National Museum of Play.

Rain Bosworth, an assistant professor and experimental psychologist at RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf, has created a new research lab that will help scientists learn more about cognition, language, and perception in infants and young children.

Cecilia Alm, an associate professor in RIT’s College of Liberal Arts, was awarded nearly $2 million by the National Science Foundation to lead a team of RIT faculty addressing a lack of diversity in the artificial intelligence research community and gaps in AI curricula.

A new research lab, sponsored by NTID, will soon open to help scientists learn more about cognition, language, and perception in infants and young children.  

To help address a lack of diversity, as well as gaps in AI curricula, RIT was awarded a grant of nearly $2 million by the NSF to create a new research traineeship program for graduate students

While it isn’t surprising that infants and children love to look at people’s movements and faces, recent research from NTID studies exactly where they look when they see someone using sign language. The research uses eye-tracking technology that offers a non-invasive and powerful tool to study cognition and language learning in pre-verbal infants.

RIT had its best year ever for sponsored research funding. For fiscal year 2020, which ended June 30, RIT received 382 new awards totaling $82 million. The record funding follows almost $58 million in research expenditures in fiscal year 2019, also a record.

A recent study has shown that readers’ eye gaze behaviors are strong indicators of words that are unexpected, new, or difficult to understand. The study by Rain Bosworth, an assistant professor and researcher at NTID, explores the unknown qualities of gaze behavior for “sign watching” and how these are affected by a user’s language expertise and intelligibility of the sign input.  

New research is helping scientists around the world understand what drives language change, especially when languages are in their infancy. The results will shed light on how the limitations of the human brain change language and provide an understanding of the complex interaction between languages and the human beings who use them.