Nina Semushina defends her dissertation and becomes a post-doc at the University of Chicago

Nina Semushina successfully defended her dissertation “The linguistic representation of number: Cross-linguistic and cross-modal perspectives” on August 20, 2021. She started a post-doc at the University of Chicago with Susan Goldin-Meadow and R. Breckie Church, investigating the effectiveness of teaching methods that incorporate gesture or spatial highlighting tools for math learning in hearing and deaf children and adults.

Eva Wittenberg publishes new paper on experimental design

Former UCSD undergrad Suhas Arehalli and his advisor Eva Wittenberg published a new article in Linguistics Vanguard, titled “Experimental filler design influences error correction rates in a word restoration paradigm”.

Abstract: Including fillers or distractors in psycholinguistic experiments has been standard for decades; yet, relatively little is known how the design of these items interacts with critical manipulations. In this paper, we ask about the role that contextual statistical information in filler items plays in determining if and how to correct a given error, and how grammatical expectations interact with context. We first replicate a speech restoration experiment conducted by Mack et al. (2012), measuring usage preferences of null-subject constructions. Then we report two additional experiments in which we manipulated only the filler items, either having noise appear uniformly at random, or with a particular bias. Our results (1) demonstrate that listeners are sensitive to statistical patterns in the distribution of noise within the experiment, and (2) suggest that this paradigm can be used to investigate interaction between the mechanisms that govern grammatical preferences, and those that govern error correction processes.

The paper is available here (Open Access).