Engage with us

Collaborations

CLaS members have established new links with Australian academic and industrial organisations, especially those housed in the Australian Hearing Hub.

Our academic members have relationships with:

• Cochlear Ltd
• National Acoustics Laboratories (NAL)
• Shepherd Centre
• Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children (RIDBC).

International collaboration

CLaS has also established relationships with international academic institutions across the globe. In Asia, these include the:

• Kanazawa Institute of Technology in Japan
• Academia Sinica in Taiwan
• Beijing Language and Culture University
• City University of Hong Kong.

Macquarie University has partnered with Seattle-based natural language technology firm VoiceBox Technologies to create a new voice artificial intelligence (AI) company.

Professor Mark Johnson, former director of CLaS, is VoiceBox Australia’s chief scientific officer. This partnership will prioritise commercialising the work of PhD students in the field.

Researchers from CLaS and the Beijing Language and Culture University have joined forces to study child language acquisition in both English and Mandarin Chinese. They are investigating preschool children’s knowledge of universal properties of language. For example, we ask if preschool children know that the English word ‘any’ and Chinese word ‘renhe’ can be used correctly in certain sentences, but not others. To answer this question, we are using a technique called MEG. 

Our research has found that children’s brains work harder to process words that are not used correctly. The brain responses were strikingly similar in children learning Chinese and English.

Study with us

We welcome new Higher Degree Research students. Masters of Research (MRes) and PhD students have the opportunity to work with our academic members on research projects and to participate in our vibrant community.

Students and postdoctoral fellows have unique opportunities to:

• engage in interdisciplinary research with prominent scholars in linguistics, cognitive science and the neurosciences
• attend a speaker series on a wide range of topics
• interact with many international visitors.

Please feel free to get in touch with individual researchers if you are interested in being part of CLaS and studying at Macquarie University.