The New York Times has a piece on implicit gender bias in politics, highlighting research co-authored by graduate student Till Poppels (as well as adjunct professor Roger Levy). You can read the paper itself here. Congratulations, Till!
Monthly Archives: January 2020
Qi Cheng awarded NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant
Graduate student Qi Cheng, a Ph.D candidate in our department and a member of Rachel Mayberry Lab for Multimodal Language Development, was recently awarded a National Science Foundation Linguistics Program – Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (#1917922) for her dissertation work. Her research examines the biological foundations of human language with a focus on early language experience, linking observations from language learning, processing, and the brain network. Supported by the grant, she is currently conducting two psycholinguistic experiments to explore sentence processing strategies used by deaf late signers who suffered from early language deprivation. She presented the preliminary findings at CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing and Theoretical Issues in Signed Language Research (TISLR). She recently published a paper on the neural language pathways of deaf signers with and without early language on Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Cheng, Q., & Mayberry, R. ‘Word order or world knowledge? Effects of early language deprivation on simple sentence comprehension.’ Oral presentation at the 13th conference of Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research, Hamburg, Germany, September 2019.
Cheng, Q., Roth, A., Halgren, E., & Mayberry, R. I. ‘Effects of early language deprivation on brain connectivity: Language pathways in deaf native and late first-language learners of American Sign Language.’ Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13, 320. 2019
Nina Semushina awarded NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant
Graduate student Nina Semushina, a PhD candidate in our department and a member of Rachel Mayberry Lab for Multimodal Language Development, was recently awarded a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (Ling-DDRI) for the project “The development of numerical cognition and linguistic number use: Insights from sign languages”. The goal of the project is to study the effects of language deprivation on the acquisition of numeracy and linguistic number use in American sign language, taking into account some modality-specific properties of numeral systems and plural morphology in sign languages.
Ivano Caponigro is presenting at UC Berkeley
Faculty member Ivano Caponigro is giving a talk on “Logic and Grammar: Richard Montague’s Turn towards Natural Language” at the Working Group in the History and Philosophy of Logic, Mathematics, and Science at UC Berkeley on March 18, 2020. Ivano will present some of the findings from the intellectual and personal biography of Richard Montague (1930-1971) that he is currently working on.
Nese Demir presenting at TU+5
Graduate student Neşe Demir will be presenting her poster “Vowel Harmony in Trabzon Turkish” at the 5th Workshop on Turkish and languages in contact with Turkic (TU+5) at the University of Delaware on February 8-9, 2020.
Ivano Caponigro at the workshop on “Non-interrogative subordinate wh-clauses”
Faculty member Ivano Caponigro is an invited speaker at the workshop on “Non-interrogative subordinate wh-clauses” at the University of Cologne (Germany) on February 7-8, 2020.
Emily Clem has a new paper on switch-reference in NELS 49 Proceedings
Faculty member Emily Clem published a paper entitled “Object-sensitive switch-reference and insatiable probes” in NELS 49: Proceedings of the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, Vol. 1.
Nina Feygl Semushina and Rachel Mayberry have a new paper on numeral incorporation in Russian Sign Language
Graduate student Nina Feygl Semushina and faculty member Rachel Mayberry published a paper Numeral Incorporation in Russian Sign Language: Phonological Constraints on Simultaneous Morphology in Sign Language Studies, vol. 20 no. 1.
Abstract. Numeral incorporation is the simultaneous combination of a numeral and a base sign into one sign. Incorporating forms typically use the numerical handshape combined simultaneously with the movement, location, and orientation of the base lexical sign: for example, “3 months” will be expressed through an incorporating form 3_MONTH. Analyses of Russian Sign Language (RSL) data collected through fieldwork in Russia, show that there is no general linguistic rule for numeral incorporation in RSL (unlike in ASL which has a one-handed numeral system). Instead, because of phonological constraints that govern the distribution of two-handed signs, incorporation of two-handed numerals in RSL depends upon the place of articulation and the hand orientation of the particular lexical sign.