Alex Rodríguez, Maho Takahashi, and Grant Goodall present at HSP 2023

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”.

JJ Lim receives language revitalization award

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.

Emily Davis presented at the Linguistic Society of America, 2023 Annual meeting

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 defends their dissertation and accepts post-doc position at the MPI for Psycholinguistics

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!

JJ Lim is awarded a Social Science Research Council Graduate Research Fellowship

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.

Yaqian Huang awarded NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant

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 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.

Nina Feygl Semushina co-organizes a workshop on Sign Language studies at V-NYI

Graduate student Nina Feygl Semushina organized a virtual workshop on “Sign Language Studies” on July 21-30, together with Masha Esipova (Princeton University), Philippe Schlenker (NYU/CNRS), and Valeria Vinogradova (University of East Anglia). The workshop highlighted different areas of sign language linguistics, such as iconicity, variation, language acquisition, and sign & gesture. On July 28, Nina gave a presentation on “Acquisition of number and language: does the order matter? Age of first language acquisition effects on automatic number processing.
The workshop was dedicated to the memory of Tatiana Davidenko, a pioneering Deaf teacher and researcher of Russian Sign Language, who passed away in June 2020.
The workshop was part of the Virtual Summer Institute of Linguistics, Cognition, and Culture (V-NYI), organized by Stony Brook University (NY) and Herzen State Pedagogical University (St. Petersburg, Russia). This year, V-NYI Summer Institute connected 301 students & 55 faculty members from 43 countries.