In Italian Studies and French/Francophone Studies, graduate students work closely with individual faculty members to pursue their research interests and learn from faculty expertise. In French Linguistics, the department has research groups which focus on one area or problem in the field and faculty also engage in individual mentoring.

The Second Language Acquisition of French Laboratory, led by Professor Laurent Dekydtspotter, investigates the role of real-time syntactic analysis (parsing) in sentence comprehension by native and non-native language users, through psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic means.

Recent collaborative research projects involving our faculty and graduate students include:

• Transcription and digitization of audio recordings of the Picard language - departmental grant
• Morphological tagging and syntactic tree correction of the Flamenca manuscript in Old Occitan departmental grant
• Funding application and event organization for the Tournées French Film Festival- departmental grant
• Organization of an exhibition of banned books and engravings at the Lilly Library - departmental grant
• Proofreading and manuscript preparation for the work Universal History and the Making of the Global - departmental grant
• The Preparation of a Differential, Historical, and Etymological Dictionary of Louisiana French - National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant
• Preparation for publication of a digital edition of Francesco Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta - National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant

In addition to departmental awards for collaborative projects, the department and Indiana University provide several other funding opportunities for graduate students to pursue research.