Linguistics & English Language Research Facilities

Welcome to our discipline's research facilities page. Explore the inventory that allows us to conduct our unique and innovative research in LAEL!

Our discipline has been highly successful in securing continuous internal and external funding for both research equipment and software.

Our equipment is used by a diverse range of staff research profiles and spread between two major labs:

- the Phonetics Lab https://phoneticslab.github.io/

- the BaBEL EEG Lab https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/social-sciences/linguistics-and-english-language/research/multilingualism/babel/

Read about our facilities below.

Hardware

• EEG System: Brain Products full Electroencephalography (EEG) setup to investigate brain activity during language processing.
• Eye Tracking: Tobii TX300 desktop eyetracker and Tobii Pro Fusion mobile eyetracker to explore language processing through eye movements.
• Articulography: Carstens AG501 Electromagnetic Articulograph (EMA) for measuring tongue and lip movements and timing during speech.
• Ultrasound Tongue Imaging: Ultrasonix and Mindray systems, plus portable micro Ultrasound Tongue Imaging setups for capturing tongue shapes.
• Sound Booth: IAC Acoustics soundproof booth for high-quality speech recordings.
• Voice Analysis: Laryngograph electroglottographs for studying vocal fold activity.
• Aerodynamics: Biopac aerodynamics system and a custom-built nasalance system for analysing airflow and pressure in speech.
• Data Immersion suite: We make use of LU's state of the art £5m Data Immersion Suite as part of our forensic linguistics offerings and research. https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/scc/study/facilities/data-immersion-suite/

Software - custom made/home grown uniquely developed at Lancaster

This software is heavily used in our ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science https://cass.lancs.ac.uk/

• LancsBox X (corpus linguistics software for collocation research, see more here: https://lancsbox.lancs.ac.uk/
• Wmatrix (tool for corpus analysis and comparison, see more here: https://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/
• CLAWS (part-of-speech tagger for English language corpus annotation, see more here: https://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/claws/
• CQPweb (corpus query processor for corpus linguistics, see more here: https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/

Software - successfully funded just for LAEL researchers

• Articulate Instruments Advanced (ultrasound and video analysis)
• Tobii Pro Lab (eyetracking gaze data analysis)

University-licensed software

In addition to our own software, we also make use of software that is licensed generally through Lancaster as an institution.

Check out some of our most commonly used software below, frequently used by staff and students:

• NVivo & Atlas.ti: Used for qualitative discourse analysis of large datasets.
• Facets & Winsteps: Rasch analysis software (commonly used in language testing research).
• Qualtrics: Survey platform for collecting language data and attitudes.
• Camtasia: Licensed video editing software.
• Adobe Creative Cloud: Visual design tools.