Category: Alumni News

SLUGS AT CUNY

At the end of winter quarter, Jed Pizarro-Guevara, Matt Wagers, and Adrian Brasoveanu traveled north along with an entourage of Santa Cruz psycholinguists (Margaret Kroll, Steven Foley, Nick Van Handel, Jake Vincent, and Netta Ben-Meir) for the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference at UC Davis. Jed presented a poster co-authored with Matt Wagers entitled “Not all filler-gap dependencies are perceived alike: Evidence from Tagalog”. Meanwhile, Adrian presented joint work with Jakub Dotlačil: both a poster called “Modeling Lexical Access in ACT-R” as well as a talk on “A cognitively realistic left-corner parser with visual and motor interfaces“. Several former Slugs also attended, including Shayne Sloggett (BA, ‘10), Caroline Andrews (BA, ‘11), Adam Morgan (MA, ‘13), Ekaterina Kravtchenko (MA, ‘13), and Chelsea Miller (BA, ’14, MA, ’16). On-leave faculty Amanda Rysling graced CUNY with her presence, and organized a joint UMass-UCSC dinner. Delicious Indian food was had, and many bottles of wine, consumed.

LUNDEN AND GRIBANOVA AWARDED TENURE

Congratulations to two of our Ph.D. alums, Anya Lunden (2006, College of William and Mary) and Vera Gribanova (2010, Stanford University), who both learned this week that they have been awarded tenure at their respective institutions. We are immensely happy for (and proud of) Vera and Anya, and hope that they can mark this transformative moment with an appropriate number of naps.

USSISHKIN COLLOQUIUM

This Friday, February 16th, at 1:20 pm in Humanities 1, Room 210, there will be a colloquium by Adam Ussishkin (University of Arizona). His talk is entitled “Roots, or consonants? On the early role of morphology in lexical access.” The abstract is given below:

Words consist of a phoneme or letter sequence that maps onto meaning. Most prominent theories of both auditory and visual word recognition portray the recognition process as a connection between these units and a semantic level. However, there is a growing body of evidence in the priming literature suggesting that there is an additional, morphological level that mediates the recognition process. In morphologically linear languages like English, however, morphemes and letter or sound sequences are co-extensive, so the source of priming effects between related words could be due to simple phonological overlap as opposed to morphological overlap. In Semitic languages, though, the morphological structure of words reduces this confound, since morphemes are interdigitated in a non-linear fashion. Semitic words are typically composed of a discontiguous root (made up of three consonants) embedded in a word pattern specifying the vowels and the ordering between consonants and vowels. Active-passive pairs in Maltese illustrate this relationship (the root is underlined); e.g., fetaħ ‘open’-miftuħ ‘opened’. In this talk, I report on a series of experiments on the Semitic language Maltese investigating the extent to which root morphemes facilitate visual and auditory word recognition, and to what extent potential priming effects are independent of the phonological overlap typically inherent in morphological relationships. These experiments make use of the visual masked (Forster and Davis, 1984) and auditory masked (Kouider and Dupoux, 2005) priming techniques. The results of the experiments show that not only do roots facilitate visual and auditory word recognition in Maltese, but that these morphological effects are independent of phonological overlap effects.

MORETTI BECOMES SLP

Undergrad alum Mary Moretti (Linguistics B.A. 2013) writes that she received the MS is speech-language pathology from the University of New Mexico in December. She’s hoping to work with deaf and hard of hearing children or with transgender women seeking voice feminization therapy. Congratulations, Mary!

SALT LAKE CITY SLUGS

The streets of Salt Lake City were full to their 132-foot-wide brim with slugs over the January 4-7 weekend at the annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America. Featured were a slew of presentations and posters by current graduate students: Jenny Bellik, Steven Foley, Nick Kalivoda, Tom Roberts, and Erik Zyman. The greater UCSC diaspora was also well-represented with the many alumni presenting work, including Aaron Kaplan (Utah), Anya Lunden (William & Mary), Ruth Kramer (Georgetown), Nick LaCara (Toronto), Mark Norris (Oklahoma), Jason Riggle (Chicago), and Nathan Sanders (Toronto)–to say nothing of the scores of alums in attendance. Attendees reported a collegial, stimulating atmosphere and expressed both joy at reuniting with old friends and pleasant surprise at the robustness of the SLC craft brewing scene.

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