Graduate students Alex Rodríguez and Maho Takahashi, along with faculty member Grant Goodall, presented posters at the 2023 Human Sentence Processing conference held at the Univ. of Pittsburgh. Alex’s and Grant’s poster was on “Clitic Left Dislocation in Spanish: Island sensitivity without gaps”, while Maho and Grant presented two posters, one on “Island effects persist despite context: The case of double relatives in Japanese” and the other on “Crossed vs. nested dependencies and crosslinguistic variability in islands”.

PhD candidate JJ Lim and his collaborators, Ghilyana Dordzhieva and Darina Gedeeva, were selected to be part of the 2023 cohort of the Wikitongues Language Revitalization Accelerator program. The award comes with specialized training, in-kind support, and a $2000 grant, to support projects on language revitalization. JJ and his collaborators are working to revitalize the Kalmyk language in the Kalmyk American diaspora, which is concentrated primarily in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. They will use this opportunity to develop a first-of-its-kind conversational English-Kalmyk language course geared towards beginners, which includes a textbook, online dictionary and website with supplementary materials. Find out more about their project here.

Graduate student Joshua Wampler and former faculty member Eva Wittenberg will be presenting a poster entitled Discourse structure affects reference resolution to events in English: Evidence from a new paradigm at CogSci23, the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, which will be held in Sydney, Australia July 26-29, 2023.

Graduate student Emily Davis presented both a talk and a poster at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting 2023 in Denver, which was held January 5-8, 2023. The title of the talk was “Multiple center-embedding is more common in verb-final languages” and the abstract can be seen here. The poster was entitled “Learnability and emergence of dependency structures in an artificial language”, the abstract can be seen here, while the poster is below.

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!

Graduate student JJ Lim was awarded the Social Science Research Council Graduate Research Fellowship (SSRC GRF) by the Singapore Social Science Research Council and the Singapore Ministry of Education for his project titled `Investigation of agreement markers across Mongolian’.
The fellowship consists of a research grant, mentorship by faculty at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and an opportunity to visit Singapore to engage in research activities with NUS.

Graduate student Yaqian Huang, a PhD candidate in our department, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (Ling-DDRI, with Prof. Marc Garellek) for the project “Phonetics of period doubling.” The goal of the project is to study the production and perception of period doubling, an irregular voice quality with more than one pitch. Yaqian will characterize the articulatory and acoustic properties of period doubling, and determine how it affects pitch and tone perception.

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.

Graduate student JJ Lim has a new paper in English Language & Linguistics, titled “Ethnic and gender variation in the use of Colloquial Singapore English discourse particles,” with co-authors Jakob Leimgruber, Wilkinson Gonzales and Mie Hiramoto.