Newsbites (Page 3)

Language Skills

PHOTO: Normand Blouin

Language has been at the heart of much debate in Quebec over the last two decades, but there has never been any question about McGill's pre-eminence in the field of language acquisition. Indeed, the establishment last fall of a unique PhD program highlights the impressive range of expertise in the field among McGill scholars.

The doctoral-level Language Acquisition Program (LAP) draws professors from the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and from the Departments of Linguistics, Psychology and Second Language Education. Psychologist Fred Genesee, director of the LAP, says proudly, "No other university across North America provides such a wide breadth of research on language acquisition as McGill." That's no idle boast -- last November the Boston University Conference on Language Development pronounced McGill first among all universities on the continent in language acquisition research. With 160 studies conducted over the past 25 years, McGill surpasses Stanford, MIT and Harvard. LAP faculty members have explored the social, cognitive, linguistic, neural and psychological dimension of language learning.

Having access to experts in everything from sign language to multilingualism, infant babbling (a specialty of Professor Lauro Petitto, pictured here in conversation with a young friend), passive learning and impaired language development, graduates of this new program will have no problem talking the talk.

Pulling for McGill

	PHOTO: Courtesy Philippe Nieuwwnhof

No, McGill isn't becoming part of the Formula One circuit, but some ambitious Mac students are taking tractor pulls very seriously.

After last year's freshman appearance at the quarter-scale tractor design competition organized by the American Society of Agricultural Engineers in East Moline, Illinois, McGill Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering students are readying themselves for the 2001 edition. The event is open to all faculties and departments of agricultural and biosystems engineering across North America and has students design and build a quarter-scale tractor themselves, then take to the track. Judging is based on overall design, a team presentation, and of course, the tractor pull.

"Driving the tractor during the competition is probably the most exciting and rewarding moment," says team captain Philippe Nieuwenhof, a third-year agricultural and biosystems engineering student, whose uncle Freddie Nieuwenhof, BSc(Agr)'01, was last year's captain. "The work of one whole year is paid back by four pulls of less than two minutes each."

The McGill students placed 21st out of 28 last time and were cheered on by fellow Canadian participants from Université Laval and the University of Manitoba. This year -- with more experience under their fan belts -- they plan on making the top ten.

"During the first year, everything had to be started from scratch," says Nieuwenhof. "The experience we gained last year is really a solid foundation on which we are building and which we hope will be transferred to new team members."

The design for their new tractor is almost complete and construction has already begun. "We're really anxious to participate," says Nieuwenhof. "We've put a lot of effort into developing an automatic weight transfer system and we've designed a very original tractor configuration. We also built a computer program to calculate the best adjustments for the transmission and weight distribution."

The 13-member team is sponsored by the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and they are now working on getting more private support. The students and their new tractor head off for Illinois in June.

Check out the team's website.