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.

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.