Armin Mester and Junko Ito Back From Japan

After their half-year sojourn in Japan, Junko Ito and Armin Mester are back in Santa Cruz! While in Tokyo, Junko continued her directorship at the UC Tokyo Study Center, which oversees the Japan UC Education Abroad Program, and Armin was visiting professor at NINJAL (National INstitute of JApanese Language and Linguistics), working with Professor Haruo Kubozono (former LRC associate). Besides continuing their research on the prosodic hierarchy and the syntax-phonology interface, Armin and Junko gave presentations at the Japanese-Korean Conference in Seoul on “the Perfect prosodic word and the sources of unaccentedness”, and at the International Conference on Phonetics and Phonology in Kyoto on “Nonprominent positions”. During their stay in Tokyo, they were able to meet up with Shigeto Kawahara (Rutgers University, last year’s keynote speaker at LURC, and former undergraduate visitor), as well as other UCSC(-related) folks: Matt Wagers, Ryan Bennett; former LRC associates Ryuji Harada (Otsuma University), Takeru Homma (Tokyo Metropolitan University), and Shin Ishihara (University of Frankfurt).