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A primary area of research in CU’s Linguistics department is the investigation of the relationship between language and the mind/brain. Focusing on the production, comprehension, and acquisition of language, this work is based on theory and methods common to Linguistics, Psychology and Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences.In recent years, the relationship between language and thought has also emerged as a foundational subfield that interfaces with Cognitive Anthropology, Sociology, and Communication. CU Linguistics researchers use a variety of methods including analysis of spontaneous speech corpora, laboratory experimentation, and elicited data-collection to investigate: 

• Speech production and perception (Prof. Rebecca Scarborough)
• The acquisition of language in children from different cultures and the language-cognition interface (Prof. Bhuvana Narasimhan)

Current CU research projects in psycholinguistics and experimental linguistics include:

• Listener-directed speech phenomena
• Word-specific phonetic variation
• Variability in co-articulation
• The influence of information structure on word order
• The acquisition of argument structure and case-marking in Hindi
• The semantic categorization of placement events across languages
• The role of auditory, visual and linguistic cues in word learning by young children

Faculty and students doing work in psycholinguistics and phonetics are active participants in the , which supports interdisciplinary collaboration in the study of language and cognition.