Banana Slugs at HSP
UC Santa Cruz was well represented at the 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, held March 27-29 at the University of Maryland. A number of undergraduates and graduates were there to present their research, including Matthew Kogan, Joshua Lieberstein, Subhekshya Shrestha, and Ruoqing Yao. They were joined by current faculty members Dustin Chacón, Amanda Rysling, and Matt Wagers.
They ran into many grad alumni, including Jack Duff (PhD, 2023) and Duygu Demiray (MA, 2024), undergrad alumni/current Baggett Fellows Jackson Confer (BA, 2022) and Sadie Lewis (BA, 2023), as well as former LRC visitor Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University). Two other slugs, 2011 BA alum Caroline Andrews (Zurich) and 2013 MA alum Adam Morgan (NYU Langone), anchored a well-attended and engaging plenary session featuring field psycholinguistics on the last day. They presented their research on case and sentence planning in Shipibo (Andrews) and the comprehension and production of switch reference in Nungon (Morgan). Despite the riveting science, it seems everyone found an opportunity to slip out in the warm weather to see the cherry blossoms or at least to rub Testudo for good luck.
Presentations by current members of the department:
- “Subject islands are not caused by information structure clashes: cross-constructional evidence“, by first authors Matthew Kogan, Mandy Cartner (TAU), and Nikolas Webster and Matt Wagers and Ivy Sichel
- “Ambiguity advantage effect in wh-questions”, by first author Joshua Lieberstein and Matt Wagers
- “Now you see it… ? : Agreement sensitivity in ‘at-a-glance’ reading in Spanish”, by first author Subhekshya Shrestha and Dustin Chacón
- “Who gets to start the race? Distinguished referents in pronominal ambiguity resolution”, by first author Ruoqing Yao and Matt Wagers
and those by our alumni:
- “Eager interpretation of discourse-level ambiguities: New evidence for costly reanalysis”, by John Duff (Saarland; PhD, 2023) and Kelsey Sasaki (Oxford; PhD, 2021) (with Daniel Altshuler)
- “Building a Cross-Linguistic Typology of Sentence Planning from Case Alignment”, by Caroline Andrews (Zurich; BA, 2011) (with Sebastian Sauppe, Roberto Zariquiey, and Balthasar Bickel)
- “Processing Switch Reference Marking in Nungon: Comprehension & Production Measures”, by Adam Morgan (NYU Langone; MA, 2013) (with Jenny Yu, Ismael Dono, Lyn Ögate, and Hannah Sarvasy)
- “From Single Words to Sentence Production: Shared Cortical Representations but Distinct Temporal Dynamics”, by Adam Morgan (NYU Langone; MA, 2013) (with Orrin Devinsky, Werner Doyle, Patricia Dugan, Daniel Friedman, and Adeen Flinker)
UC Santa Cruz linguists at HSP 2025