MSU Scholars Recognize Linguistic Research Project by TSPU Students

Students from the Institute of Foreign Languages and International Cooperation (IFLIC) at the Tomsk State Pedagogical University were invited to present their research at the International Conference on Experimental Linguistics, hosted by Lomonosov Moscow State University. Young researchers Yana Rabinovich and Kamilla Ziyadanova, members of the IFLIC Student Scientific Association, presented results of their experimental phonetic study of Kazakh vowel systems in the Altai Republic and Mongolia. Their research was conducted under the guidance of Valeria Lemskaya, Deputy Director of IFLIC for Science and Development, and associate professor Denis Tokmashev.

This project addresses the growing role of pedagogical universities in the scientific landscape. Russia’s Minister of Education, Sergey Kravtsov, has emphasized that each pedagogical university has its own scientific and pedagogical schools, and that young researchers are actively contributing to the development of social sciences, humanities, pedagogy, and natural sciences.The research experience of students and faculty at Russian pedagogical universities continues to attract attention from academic peers across the country.

In April 2025, Sofia Ermyshina and Ekaterina Kolupaeva, students from the Institute of Foreign Languages and International Cooperation (IFLIC) at the Tomsk State Pedagogical University, were invited to Chuvash State University named after I.N. Ulianov. There, they presented the results of a collaborative project focused on revising and publishing a multilingual dictionary of linguistic terms. Just two months later, in June, fellow IFLIC students Yana Rabinovich and Kamilla Ziyadanova took part in the International Conference on Experimental Linguistics at Lomonosov Moscow State University. Their presentation focused on vowel systems in the Kazakh language, based on fieldwork conducted in the Altai Republic and Mongolia using advanced ultrasound phonetic technology. These achievements underscore the active involvement of pedagogical university students in cutting-edge research and the growing recognition of their work in the broader academic community.

«The idea behind the project was to compare dialects of the same language spoken in different countries, — explained Valeria Lemskaya, Deputy Director for Science and Development at the Institute of Foreign Languages and International Cooperation (IFLIC ), the Tomsk State Pedagogical University. — said The goal was to visualize vowel articulation among native speakers of Kazakh from different regions. Kamilla Ziyadanova, a native speaker of the Kosh-Agach Kazakh dialect spoken in the Altai Republic, and Khundyz Togtagan, who speaks the Bayan-Ulgii Kazakh dialect from Mongolia, recorded synchronized ultrasound, audio, and video data with support from IFLIC graduates. The stimuli were based on a questionnaire developed by researchers at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow). The students then processed the material, created unified visualizations, and compared the phonetic data for each dialect».

According to Lemskaya, the project offered a rare opportunity to observe subtle articulation differences between closely related dialects, using cutting-edge linguistic technology.

At the conference held at Lomonosov Moscow State University, which brought together students, postgraduates, and scholars from Russia, China, Singapore, Jordan, and other countries, students from the Tomsk State Pedagogical University presented their research project and shared results. According to Yana, the presentation by the TSPU students caused strong interest among fellow researchers, who not only asked questions about the work and its outcomes but also offered suggestions for its advancement, including potential collaboration. One of the proposed ideas was to conduct a survey among older native speakers of Mongolian and Kosh-Agach Kazakh, who are less influenced by external linguistic factors and maintain a deeper connection to their native language.

In the near future, it is planned to record additional experimental data and interpret it, as well as to identify the specific features of the Kosh-Agach variety of the Kazakh language in order to develop concrete recommendations for developers of machine translation systems for and from the languages of the peoples of Russia..