Research Assistant/Associate

Newcastle University - School of Psychology

We are a world class research-intensive university. We deliver teaching and learning of the highest quality. We play a leading role in economic, social and cultural development of the North East of England. Attracting and retaining high-calibre people is fundamental to our continued success.

Salary
Research Assistant Level - £33,002 to £34,610 per annum.
Research Associate Level - £35,608 to £37,694 per annum.

The Role
We are seeking a Research Assistant/Associate to play a key role in the ESRC/NSF-funded project, "INvestigating and Treebanking Scots And Yiddish Together (InTSaYT)," based in the School of Psychology, Faculty of Medical Sciences, Newcastle University. The project will build syntactically annotated (parsed) corpora of modern and historical Yiddish and Scots, and use them to test novel hypotheses in the application of information theory to syntax and language processing. Thus, the role will involve syntax, diachronic linguistics, psycholinguistics and, to some extent, computational linguistics.

Under the guidance of project PI, Dr Joel C. Wallenberg, the researcher's initial focus will be in creating a 1 million word syntactically parsed corpus of modern and historical Yiddish, by correcting the output of a statistical parser applied to Yiddish sentences (in accordance with the standards of the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English and the Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus). In completing that task, the researcher will collaborate with the computational linguistics team at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as with the other UK Co-I, Dr Lisa Gotthard (University of Edinburgh). During the second half of the appointment, the role will shift to designing observational experiments using the resulting corpus, analysing results, and preparing project publications.

The researcher will also be expected to engage in the general research life of the School of Psychology and in the cross-Faculty group, Cognition, Behaviour and Evolution (formerly Centre for Behaviour and Evolution).

The post is full-time for a period of 3 years, to begin in May 2026 (with some flexibility). You will report to Project Lead Dr Joel C. Wallenberg, and informal inquiries can be directed to him at joel.wallenberg@ncl.ac.uk.