CASL People

Allison Blodgett

To Allison Blodgett, language processing is the ultimate mystery. "I've always been interested in how people manage to make sense of anything that comes out of other people's mouths," she says. "If you think about how hard it is to understand a foreign language, how can we possibly turn words in our own language into anything meaningful?"

Blodgett now explores this question through her work at the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL)—but she began her scientific research career delving into medical mysteries. After earning a bachelor's degree in linguistics from the University of New Hampshire, she joined the Physicians' Health Study at Harvard University as a member of a team investigating beta carotene and its possible role in the prevention of cancer.

Her fascination with language persisted, however, and she soon enrolled in the graduate linguistics program at Ohio State University. Here she honed her interest to the study of prosody in spoken language, which includes the way people use changes in pitch and group words into phrases to convey meaning. This specialty was of particular interest to the directors of CASL, who wanted to explore why certain languages like Vietnamese, which has a very different prosodic system from English, are so difficult for native English speakers—specifically United States Foreign Service officials—to learn. And conversely, CASL's mission was of particular interest to Blodgett, who after years of graduate work was looking for a research position that would "serve a greater purpose."

"In this case, there is a particular issue that the US government is facing, and this research helps give them the answers to that particular issue," she says. "I like the applied nature of the research."

Blodgett is now involved with several studies at CASL. She and several other researchers are investigating the pitch structures of Emirati Arabic, which is spoken in the United Arab Emirates. Through this study they hope to gain some insight into how native speakers of Emirati Arabic use pitch to emphasize or deemphasize certain information or change the meaning of a sentence. Blodgett also leads a team working with Vietnamese, hoping that by better understanding the distinctive lexical tones and accents of the language, she can help the Foreign Service Institute better train its officials preparing for posting in Vietnam. "I'd like to make a difference in the way that professionals in the US government perform language tasks," says Blodgett. "To make a positive difference...and allow them to learn languages faster, more successfully and more efficiently."