UCSD presentations at the Annual Meeting on Phonology

Two UCSD linguists will be presenting work at the upcoming Annual Meeting on Phonology at UCLA (Oct. 21-23):

  • Postdoctoral researcher Eric Meinhardt will be introducing the audience at the Computational Approaches to Phonology workshop to “SAGUARO: a workbench for phonological theories” (a collaboration with Eric Baković)
  • Faculty member Eric Baković will be presenting a poster entitled “Faithfulness and underspecification” (a collaboration with Wm. G. Bennett, Rhodes University)

This conference is expected to take place in person. The deadline for Early Bird registration ($75, $15 students/unemployed) is October 3; the absolute deadline for registration ($100, $20 students/unemployed) is October 18.

Duk-Ho Jung and Grant Goodall have a new article in Journal of Linguistics

Graduate student Duk-Ho Jung and faculty member Grant Goodall have a new publication in Journal of Linguistics entitled “Filler–gap dependencies and the remnant–correlate dependency in backward sprouting: Sensitivity to distance and islands.” It is available open-access at https://www.doi.org/10.1017/S0022226722000366

The article examines “backward sprouting” (Although it is unclear what, Mary was drinking on the bus). Superficially, this structure looks very similar to filler-gap dependencies (It is unclear what Mary was drinking __ on the bus), but the article shows experimentally that there are actually some intriguing differences, with important implications for how sprouting structures are formed. The experiments in this article are part of Duk-Ho’s work for his forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation.

Maxine Van Doren presenting at The Fall Voice Conference

Graduate student Maxine Van Doren will be presenting a poster on voice quality in Spanish-English bilinguals at the upcoming Fall Voice Conference in San Francisco on October 6-8, 2022. She has also been invited to serve on a panel entitled, “When to Say No,” a presentation for early career speech-language pathologists on evaluating career opportunities and maintaining work-life balance.

Maho Takahashi and Catherine Arnett present at Machine Learning and the Evolution of Language

Graduate students Maho Takahashi and Catherine Arnett will present their poster entitled “Creating a Baseline to Evaluate Correlations Between Language and Environment” at the Machine Learning and the Evolution of Language workshop as part of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution hosted online/in Kanazawa, Japan September 5-8, 2022.

Marc Garellek has a new publication in Journal of Phonetics

Faculty member Marc Garellek has a new publication in Journal of Phonetics, entitled “Theoretical achievements of phonetics in the 21st century: Phonetics of voice quality”: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2022.101155.

The paper reviews the developments in the phonetic study of voice quality over the last twenty years, and includes discussion of some of the research done by Marc Garellek and graduate students in the department.

Ebru Evcen has a new publication in Proceedings of CogSci2022

Graduate student Ebru Evcen and the former faculty member Eva Wittenberg published the paper “Making Question under Discussion explicit shifts counterfactual interpretation” in Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Using eye-tracking data, the paper shows that comprehenders have tough time to think about the real world hearing a counterfactual utterance (e.g., If there had been zebras, then there would have been lions in the zoo) in general, but the absence of causal connection and well-defined QuD makes it even harder!

Ebru is presenting the paper in a short talk format (virtually) at the Annual Meeting of Cognitive Science Society (CogSci2022), which is held in Toronto, Canada on July 27-30, 2022.

Evcen, E., & Wittenberg, E. (2022). Making the Question Under Discussion explicit shifts counterfactual interpretation. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 44. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/43z0w42j

San Diego Linguistics Papers Issue 11: Allison Park on the linguistics of keysmashes

Have you ever been so flustered, amused, frustrated, or surprised that you… just… lkajhslkasdf?

Well, Allison Park sure has, and they’ve turned their experience with the online practice of keysmashing into a topic of serious linguistic study. In their recent paper ‘On the linguistic behavior of keysmashes’, Allison argues that keysmashes are fundamentally linguistic, behaving according to many of the normal criteria used for establishing that expression is ‘language’, like semanticity, standards of form, and arbitrariness. Then, Park goes on to evaluate the kinds of criteria which go into people’s judgements about whether a keysmash is ‘well formed’ and ‘acceptable’, finding that not only do keysmashes have to be the right length and have the right amount of repetition, but that the location on the keyboard of the characters used is crucial, along with other important characteristics.

For more information about this work, their findings, and the social, linguistic, and communicative goals of keysmashing, have a look at San Diego Linguistics Papers Issue 11 on eScholarship.

San Diego Linguistic Papers is the working papers archive of the Department of Linguistics at UC San Diego.

Anna Mai defends their dissertation and accepts post-doc position at the MPI for Psycholinguistics

Anna Mai successfully defended their dissertation “Contrast, Neutralization, and Systems of Invariance” on June 16, 2022. They will start a post-doc this fall at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Andrea Martin’s Language and Computation in Neural Systems group, investigating language-specific speech sound representation in the brain. Congratulations, Anna!