The Graduate Institute of Linguistics at National Chung Cheng University admitted its first M.A. class in the fall of 1995. The vision of this research-oriented institute is to use the rich data from Sinitic and non-Sinitic languages in Taiwan and mainland China to advance our understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of human language. All our professors have doctoral degrees in linguistics from major research universities and each is involved in one or two nationally funded research projects per year.

     Our strong commitment to empirical cognitive science is demonstrated by our three research laboratories (a phonetics laboratory, a language processing laboratory and a computational corpus laboratory). In addition, our department has close ties with other departments related to cognitive science, including Psychology, Philosophy, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. We also offer both graduate and undergraduate courses as part of the Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science.

     The requirements for the Master's degree consist of four components: coursework, Term Paper, Qualifying Paper, and Master's Thesis. The Qualifying Paper is a long research paper intended to prepare the student for the Master's Thesis. The Term Paper is a paper written for any linguistics course on a topic outside the area of the Master's Thesis, to show the student's breadth. Thirty credits of classes are required: three credits each for the core courses on phonology and syntax, three credits for a course on research and writing (to help prepare the Qualifying Paper), six credits from a specific set of courses (phonology seminar, syntax seminar, morphology, phonetics, experimental phonetics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, semantics, semantics seminar, statistics), and the remainder from our other course offerings (including Formosan languages, fieldwork methods, cognitive linguistics, language acquisition, mathematical linguistics, corpus linguistics). Students must also attend the linguistics colloquium series. (link)