Visiting Research Fellow’s Report: Eva Huber

From March 9^th to March 27^th I was a Visiting Research Fellow (VRF) at the Department of Linguistics, UP Diliman. I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Cologne, Germany. I had previously come to the Philippines multiple times to do fieldwork in the province of Batangas. My research revolves around how children learn diverse languages. In Batangas, I have been involved in collecting and creating a child language corpus of Batangas Tagalog. This year’s trip was dedicated to reconnecting with the local community in Batangas as well as getting to know the academic landscape of linguistics in the Philippines. For the latter purpose as well as because of prior connections, the Department of Linguistics at UP Diliman seemed like the obvious choice. 

My stay at the UP Department of Linguistics was filled with multiple activities. For the annotation of our corpus, I was looking for students to join our team. Noah Cruz managed to recruit four undergraduate students of his with whom I held multiple training sessions. My visit also allowed me to engage more with Teaching Associate Katrina Jose, who had been assisting me with annotating data to study referential expressions in Tagalog-speaking children. I had only met her online prior to this trip and it was great and valuable to finally meet and work with her in person. I further met with members of the department to discuss several topics regarding the annotation of our data as well as dialectal variation in Tagalog. As a non-native speaker and foreigner, I benefitted from discussing such aspects with native speakers who are also experts in Philippine linguistics.

My stay was rounded off with two talks, one as part of the DEALleads series at De La Salle University (DLSU), hosted by my collaborator Prof. Aireen Barrios. The other one was held as part of the LSLS series at the UP Department of Linguistics. I thoroughly enjoyed presenting the corpus and some pilot studies. The discussion in the Q&A was insightful, and I hope that I evoked some interest in the field of child language acquisition among students and faculty members.

I am extremely grateful for the UP Department of Linguistics’s support and willingness to host me. Special thanks go to Assistant Professor Noah Cruz, Chair and Assistant Professor Francisco Rosario and Prof. Mary Ann G. Bacolod for their assistance and generosity.