Matt Wagers was across the pond at University College London last week, giving a series of talks as part of their linguistics seminar series. Matt reports:
“Last week I traveled to University College London to give a series of lectures in the Department of Linguistics. There I was hosted by Wing-Yee Chow, who is a Lecturer in Experimental Linguistics, and one of my collaborators. The first lecture, given to a public audience, was about the relationship between verbatim memory for whole sentences and how its degradation can be attributed to the ordinary forgetting that occurs in the course of language comprehension. I was happy to be able to incorporate some of the research that Jenny, Tom, Jed & Steven did in my Fall Seminar. The second two talks were given as seminars, and both touched on the interaction between word order and morphological resources. There I drew upon my research on Chamorro with Sandy, as well as Jed’s research on Tagalog. Abstracts and notes can be found here. I was deeply impressed by the questions and contributions I received, which were simultaneously very perceptive but also friendly and constructive. In my free time, I did a lot of walking around London. Some highlights were visiting the Temple Church, a round church built in the 12th Century by the Templars, and attending a performance of the Duchess of Malfi, a rather grim (and rather long) Jacobean tragedy in which (nearly) everyone dies!
PS: While at UCL, I also met a Banana Slug: Caitlin Canonica (Linguistics B.A. 2010) who is currently a Ph.D. student in Linguistics at UCL.”