UC San Diego Linguistics was well represented at the 16th LabPhon meeting.

Amanda Ritchart-Scott presented her poster “Perceptual enhancement of nasalized vowels through increased breathiness.”

Gabriella Caballero & Marc Garellek presented their poster “Multidimensional tonal realization and prosodic variation in Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara).”

Marc Garellek presented his talk (coauthored by Christina Esposito at Macalester College) “The effects of prosody on pitch and voice quality of White Hmong tones.”

Scott Seyfarth (PhD 2016, currently at Ohio State University) co-organized (with Beth Hume, OSU) a workshop called “The role of predictability in shaping human sound systems.”

SemanticsBabble, the interdisciplinary discussion group on formal and experimental approaches to language meaning that is lead by Ivano Caponigro (Linguistics) and Jonathan Cohen (Philosophy), has just been awarded its 6th annual grant from the UCSD Institute of Arts and Humanities. The grant will help with inviting scholars and students from other institutions to present and discuss their current research on language meaning during the academic year 2018-2019.

Adam McCollum has been awarded a President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship for 2018-19!  The award is targeted at doctoral candidates who demonstrate strong potential, promise and desire for a university teaching and research career.  Only nine such fellowships were awarded across UCSD.

Adam McCollum‘s paper “Vowel dispersion and Kazakh labial harmony” has been published in Phonology, Volume 35.

Michael Obiri-Yeboah‘s paper titled ‘Domains and Directionality in Gua Vowel Harmony’ has been selected for an award as Outstanding Graduate Student Research Paper for the African and African-American Studies Research Center.

Our graduate students Dayoung Kim and Till Poppels, our postdoc William Matchin, and our faculty members Grant Goodall, Andrew Kehler, and Eva Wittenberg are presenting five posters at the ​31st Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference at UC Davis on March 15-17, 2018:

Suhas Arehalli and Eva Wittenberg: “The mess reveals the system: People use top-down cues to resolve errors in contexts with highly random noise, but not with highly structured noise”

Dayoung Kim and Grant Goodall: “Complexity effects in A- and A’-dependencies”

Adam Morgan, Titus von der Malsburg, Victor S. Ferreira and Eva Wittenberg: “This is the structure that we wonder why anyone produces it: Resumptive pronouns in English hinder comprehension”

Till Poppels and Andrew Kehler: “Reconsidering asymmetries in voice-mismatched verb phrase ellipsis”

William Matchin, Diogo Almeida, Jon Sprouse, and Gregory Hickok: “Subject island violations involve increased semantic processing, but not increased verbal working memory resources: evidence from fMRI”

William Matchin, Christian Brodbeck, Christopher Hammerly, and Ellen Lau:
“The temporal dynamics of structure and content in the language network”

Eva Wittenberg has received a Chancellor’s Research Excellence (CRES) grant for the project “Developing eye-tracking software for psycholinguistic research in diverse populations.” The scholarship will go to Suhas Arehalli, a member of the Language Comprehension Lab and major in Computer Science.

The Language Comprehension Lab has two talks at the AMLaP-Asia 2018 conference in Hyderabad, India:

“This is the structure that we wonder why anyone produces it: Resumptive pronouns in English hinder comprehension”
Talk by Adam Morgan, Titus von der Malsburg, Victor S. Ferreira and Eva Wittenberg

“Frequency effects modulate argument sharing effects in Hindi LVCs”
Talk by Ashwini Vaidya and Eva Wittenberg

William Matchin, postdoctoral fellow for the Mayberry Laboratory for Multimodal Language Development, has written a guest post for the Talking Brains blog.

Read his post here: Abstractness, innateness, and modality-independence of language: reflections on SNL & SfN 2017