Category: Alumni News

Slugs Embrace Yolo @ CAMP[8]

Santa Cruzans migrated en masse to Yolo County last weekend for CAMP[8], to participate in the eighth edition of the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics, held at UC Davis from Nov 14-16. CAMP featured presentations (in chronological order) from Matt Wagers (“Hands-on LLM Tutorial”, with Rachel Ryskin), Matthew Kogan & Ruoqing Yao (“Sources of distortion and confusion in distributed representations of morphosyntactic structure”, with Wagers) & Cal Boye-Lynn (“A Fricative by Any Other Name: A Close Replication of Shinn & Blumstein (1984)”, with Grant McGuire & Amanda Rysling).

It also featured encounters with a number of barn-yard animals, like a Muscovy duck (pictured), some friends from UCLA (also pictured), and near-collisions with Davis’ famously numerous cyclists (imagined anxiously).

Promenading duck at the Ruhstaller Farm. Photo credit: Subhs Shrestha.

Linguists, Applied Linguists and Psychologists, oh my! L to r: Shrestha, Liu, Chan (APLX), Boye-Lynn, Hoversten (PSYC), Rysling, Yao, Kogan, Duff (UCLA Linguistics; UCSC Ph.D. ’23), Carpick, Wagers. Photo credit: M. Afkir.

Beatty at NWAV

Sam Beatty, who graduated in Spring 2025, presented a poster at NWAV 53 at the University of Michigan (11/5-7), entitled ‘Gendered voices and transgender bodies: Interlocutor gender identity and linguistic variation in trans speakers’. The poster was co-authored with Grant McGuire and Ivy Sichel, and was based on their honors thesis. Sam reports that they received meaningful feedback, interacted with other sociolinguists, and had a great time overall.

Beatty, Sichel, & McGuire (2025)

Goings-on in Gotham

Santa Cruz was well represented at NELS56, recently held at NYU (October 17-19, 2025).

Current and erstwhile slugs delivered at least four talks and four posters at this year’s edition of NELS:

Talks

  1. Yağmur Kiper, “Ellipsis as leverage for dependent case theory”
  2. Emily Knick, “Proximate futures in English and Turkish: An analogy between spatial and temporal proximity”
  3. Aidan Katson, “Expanding the nominal in English ACC- and POSS-ing nominalizations”
  4. Emilio Gonzalez, (UCSC B.A. ’22), now a graduate student in Linguistics at UCSD, “Condition A, logophors, and wh-movement”

Posters

  1. Emma Slater-Smith,”An Agree-based Account of PCC in English Double Object Constructions”
  2. Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University), “Intra-sentential code switching at the syntax-prosody interface”, co-authored with Julia Horvath
  3. Niko Webster and Ivy Sichel, “Subject islands do not reduce to construction-specific discourse function”, co-authored with Mandy Cartner, Matthew Kogan, and Matt Wagers

Front (l to r): Sichel, Cartner & Gonzalez;
Back (“”): Katson, Slater-Smith, Webster, Kiper, Knick

Rich in College Park

Recent grad Stephanie Rich (Ph.D., 2024), currently a post-doctoral research in the Psycholinguistics & Cognition Lab at Concordia University, recently delivered a colloquium talk at the University of Maryland Linguistics. Her talk was entitled “Exploring similarity based interference on the basis of context during encoding” [abstract], and it reported both on her thesis research, including collaborations with Dr. Lalitha Balachandran, as well as more recent projects at Concordia.

While at UMD she got a chance to catch up with Jackson Confer (B.A., 2022), formerly a Peer Advisor, Baggett Fellow and now Ph.D. student at Maryland.

Confer (BA, 22) and Rich (PhD, 24) at UMD

Six Slugs A-sinnin’!

According to Wiktionary, a collective of slugs may be referred to as a cornucopia. With all due emphasis on that modal, there’s no denying that Banana Slugs were copious at last month’s edition of Sinn und Bedeutung. Held at Goethe University Frankfurt, SuB30 featured presentations from many community members:

You can see most of these folks pictured below!

(l to r): Sharf, Knick, Hofmann, Unidentified Frankfurter, Li, Tamura. Not pictured: Cao.

Biba Bibbs!

Earlier this July, Richard Bibbs defended his dissertation on Phonological Asymmetries from Phonetic Substance: Case Studies in the Special Status of Laryngeals (chaired by Ryan Bennett, with committee members Grant and Amanda). That, of course, merits its own kudos, but … there’s more.

While Richard has left the halls of Stevenson, he hasn’t wandered too far: on 9/15, he started his new role as an Undergraduate Advisor in the Economics department here on campus. Richard reports that he is excited to continue helping UCSC students, now outside of the Linguistics major. He promises to visit the department when he can, but you can visit him too: his new digs are in Engineering 2.

Banana Slugs at AMP 2025

This year’s Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2025) was held September 25–26 at UC Berkeley, and UCSC was well represented by both current graduate students and alumni.

Among our current grads, Jonathan Paramore gave a talk titled “Modeling Phonetic Neutralization in Exemplar Theory.” Hanyoung Byun presented “Lenis obstruent voicing in Seoul Korean: Phonological or phonetic?”. Hanyoung’s abstract was also selected for the Best Student Abstract Award. Larry Lyu presented a poster, “The local meets the non-local: assimilation-induced transparency in vowel harmony.”

Hanyoung Byun
Jonathan Paramore
Larry Lyu

We were also delighted to see several UCSC alumni at AMP this year, including Eric Baković (UC San Diego; BA 1993), Ben Eischens (UCLA; PhD 2022), Sara Finley (Pacific Lutheran University; BA 2003), Aaron Kaplan (University of Utah; PhD 2008), and Ben Sommer (BA 2025).

From left to right: Ben Sommer, Jonathan Paramore, Hanyoung Byun, Ben Eischens, Aaron Kaplan, Larry Lyu, Eric Baković

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