Graduate student Catherine Arnett has been awarded a UC San Diego Friends of the International Center summer grant to conduct research on Zhoushanese, a Chinese dialect. Congratulations, Catherine!

Graduate student Yaqian Huang just published a paper entitled “Different attributes of creaky voice distinctly affect Mandarin tonal perception” in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 147(3): 1441-1458. The abstract is below. Congratulations, Yaqian!

Abstract. Previous work has shown mixed findings concerning the role of voice quality cues in Mandarin tones, with some studies showing that creak improves identification. This study tests the linguistic importance of acoustic properties of creak for Mandarin tone perception. Mandarin speakers identified tones with four resynthesized creak manipulations: low spectral tilt, irregular F0, period doubling, and extra-low F0. Two experiments with three conditions were conducted. In Experiment 1, the manipulations were confined to a portion of the stimuli’s duration; in Experiment 2 the creak manipulations were modified and lengthened throughout the stimuli, and in a second condition, noise was incorporated to weaken F0 cues. Listeners remained most sensitive to extra-low F0, which affected identification of the four tones differently: it improved the identification accuracy of Tone 3 and hindered that of Tones 1 and 4. Irregular F0 consistently hindered T1 identification. The effects of irregular F0, period doubling, and low spectral tilt emerged in Experiment 2, where F0 cues were less robust and creak cues were stronger. Thus, low F0 is the most prominent cue used in Mandarin tone identification, but other voice quality cues become more salient to listeners when the F0 cues are less retrievable.

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!

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

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.

Our third year graduate student Tory Sampson was awarded the best student stage presentation at the 13th triennial Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research (TISLR). Her presentation focused on the copular cycle in American Sign Language (ASL) with the sign, labeled as ‘SELF’. In this presentation, Tory presented three stages in the evolution of SELF – as a demonstrative pronoun in 1850’s French Sign Language (LSF – a predecessor of ASL), as a personal pronoun in 1910’s ASL, and finally as a copula in modern ASL. She also presented the ambiguous syntactic contexts that provided for the reinterpretation and subsequent grammaticalization of SELF. A video of her presentation can be found here.

Catherine Arnett, who is about to start our graduate program as a 1st year student, just published her paper Pathways of Change in Romance Motion Events: A Corpus-Based Comparison in the Proceedings of the Thirtieth Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL 30), pp.25-34.

Our 2nd year graduate student Ray Incamu Huaute has been awarded an Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) fellowship (2019-2010) and an Endangered Language Fund/IPA Language Legacies Award (2019-2021) for his project Expanding the Documentation and Description of Cahuilla. As part of his ELDP award, Ray has just completed a language documentation training session at SOAS University of London [group photo]. Congratulations, Ray!

Graduate student Nina Feygl Semushina was awarded a 2019-2020 Annette Merle-Smith Fellowship. Established in 2015, this award is given to students who have performed at the highest level in the Graduate Specialization in Anthropogeny, a three-year program offered by the CARTA Faculty of Anthropogeny to UC San Diego graduate students from a variety of participating UC San Diego PhD programs. Students enrolled in the program are required to complete the curriculum of elective courses on anthropogeny (explaining the origin of our species), participate in CARTA’s scientific symposia and ensuing discussions, network with researchers from around the world, and cross-train with peers from a variety of disciplines.

Tory Sampson, a 3rd year graduate student, is giving a presentation at TISLR13 (Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research) at the University of Hamburg in Germany about grammaticalization in American Sign Language (ASL). She’ll discuss the copular cycle in ASL in terms of the functionality of a certain sign, SELF, and the changing syntactic contexts in which SELF appears by supplying evidence from historical and modern corpora.