Contact:
Mike Ferlazzo
570-577-3212
570-238-6266 (c)
mike.ferlazzo@bucknell.edu
LEWISBURG, Pa. (August 7, 2025) – Grammar can be a daunting subject. There are countless rules and quirks that can be difficult to follow, let alone master. However, for Sanda Tan ’28, a linguistics and computer science double-major from Rockford, Mich., it’s the mechanics and peculiarities of language that fuel her academic passions.
“In my research, the main thing we’re trying to focus on is how children, especially second-graders, understand sentences,” says Tan, who has been working with Professor Heidi Lorimor, linguistics, as part of the Emerging Scholars Summer Research, Scholarship & Creativity Program.
Together, Tan and Professor Lorimor have been feeding different children’s books into Stanza, a Python-based natural language software that allows for the analysis of large collections of text. “Our main goal is to identify which sentence and clause structures young readers are encountering in the books they’re reading,” says Tan.
Over the summer, Tan has been able to apply both her computational skills and linguistics background to the aims of the project. She and Professor Lorimor meet weekly to discuss theories of reading comprehension and to review the fundamentals of English grammar. The rest of the time, she can usually be found in the computer lab, where she codes the Stanza data into a comprehensive database.
Ultimately, she hopes to make the database information easily searchable and accessible. “If we know what sentence structures are present and how often they occur with young readers, then we can figure out what kind of support teachers and students need to be successful,” she says.
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