Jeff Lidz talks to 150 students at Northwood High School

On Dec 18th, 2009, Jeff Lidz visited Northwood High School in Silver Spring as part of IGERT's outreach activities. Jeff gave a lecture to 150 students from the AP-Psychology and AP-French classes about the nature of human language and how children acquire language. The lecture included examples of research conducted at Maryland as part of the CNL Laboratory's Project on Children's Language Learning. The lecture was followed by a discussion period in which students related the lecture to things they were learning in their class work.

Our outreach activities with Northwood HS will continue this spring when the AP-Psychology students will again visit the University of Maryland campus to learn about the cognitive science of language through a series of graduate-student run workshops which will give students the opportunity to engage in scientific reasoning about language and to experience first-hand the research techniques used in studying human language. A cross-departmental team of graduate students organized a similar event last year that was a real hit for the high schoolers.

If you'd like to be involved in these continuing outreach activities, please contact Csilla Kajtar (ckajtar@umd.edu) and Jeff Lidz (jlidz@umd.edu).