"I took my first computer science class here in the fall, and I decided it was really fun." 

Grammar can be a daunting subject. There are countless rules and quirks that can be difficult to either follow or understand.  For instance, is it ever okay to place a proposition at the end of a sentence? When should you use whom instead of who? What exactly is a modal verb? For Sanda Tan '28, a linguistics and computer science double-major from Rockford, Michigan, it's these types of questions that fuel her academic passions.

"One construction I really like thinking about is double negatives. For instance, 'I don't not want to go,'" says Tan. "It’s a fun element of language to play with."

Tan's interest in language can be traced back to her childhood relationship with reading, which focused heavily on Mary Pope Osborne's Magic Tree House series. In fact, she enjoyed the books so much that she wrote a fan letter to the author. In this sense, choosing a college major like linguistics — something that explored the hidden mechanics of words and meaning — always seemed like a given. However, it was upon arriving at Bucknell that a class taught by Professor Susan Baish, computer science, piqued her interest.

"I took my first computer science class here in the fall, and I decided it was really fun," says Tan. "I had never done anything with computers before, but I had a blast in that class, so I thought, 'Okay, this is my new major that I'd never even considered.' "

For Tan, computer science and linguistics offered two different perspectives on a familiar subject, one that plumbed the human components of speech alongside another that explored language through the technological lens of data and information. But her pursuit of the two majors didn't just provide her with philosophical insights into the nature of language — together, they equipped her with the skills to examine and interrogate the subjects that had intrigued her since she was a child.

"In my research, the main thing we're trying to focus on is how children, especially second-graders, understand sentences," says Tan, who worked with Professor Heidi Lorimor, linguistics, as part of the Emerging Scholars Summer Research, Scholarship & Creativity Program. 

Together, Tan and Professor Lorimor fed 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," she says. "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."

In a full circle moment, Tan found herself again interacting with favorite texts from her own childhood. "The Magic Tree House series is one example of the kinds of the kinds of books we're researching," she says. Except now, instead of reading them for the transfortative power that once captured her young mind, she's approaching them with a more critical, academic eye.