Category: Alumni News

Katson at NELS55

This past week, PhD student Aidan Katson gave a talk on their work, “Event Containers,” at the 55th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 55), hosted by Yale University. Aidan also had the opportunity to reconnect with some Santa Cruz alumni: Peter Svenonius (PhD, 1994), now at the University of Tromsø, and Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022), currently at the University of Washington.

Aidan Katson delivering their talk at NELS55

From left to right: Aidan Katson (current PhD student), Peter Svenonius (PhD, 1994), Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022)



Law, Sharf, and Tamura at Sinn und Bedeutung 29 (SuB29)

Over the summer, Professor Jess Law, along with PhD students Eli Sharf and Jun Tamura, attended Sinn und Bedeutung 29 (SuB29), held in the picturesque town of Noto, Sicily, Italy. 

Eli delivered a solo talk on “Speech Acts Without Sincerity: An Analysis of Parenthetical Say in English.” Jess, along with Professor Haoze Li, presented a joint talk titled “Discourse Dynamics as a Cure to the Problem of Too Many Uniqueness Conditions.” Jun presented two posters: one solo poster on “Relative Readings of Japanese ichiban Superlatives” and a joint poster also with Haoze titled “Embedded Questions as Definite Descriptions: An Insight from Japanese.” 

In addition to exciting intellectual exchanges, they had the pleasure of reconnecting with some UC Santa Cruz alumni: Lisa Hofmann (currently a postdoctoral researcher at University of Stuttgart), Kelsey Sasaki (currently a research fellow at University of Oxford), and Kyle Rawlins (Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University).

From left to right: Jess Law, Lisa Hofmann, Kelsey Sasaki, Eli Sharf
Jun Tamura presenting his poster



Santa Crucians at AMLaP 30

In September, the 30th Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) conference took place at the University of Edinburgh, with many current and former students and faculty of the Department presenting posters or talks:

  • Linguistic boundaries delineate contextual domains in memory
    Lalitha Balachandran and Matt Wagers
  • Beyond the left hemisphere: MEG evidence for right temporal lobe recruitment in Bangla morphosyntax processing
    Dustin Chacón, with     Swarnendu Moitra and Linnaea Stockall
  • Breaking down inflected words and putting the pieces back together involve the left occipitotemporal and orbitofrontal regions: MEG evidence from Tagalog
    Dustin Chacón, with Dave Kenneth Cayado, Samantha Wray, Marco Chia-Ho Lai, Suhail Matar, and Linnaea Stockall
  • Processing covert dependencies: A study on Turkish wh-in-situ
    Duygu Demiray (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Matt Wagers
  • Effects of foil processing, decision-making, and initial attention in the Maze task
    Jack Duff (Saarland University), Pranav Anand, and Amanda Rysling
  • Deprioritizing linguistic material: The role of givenness on focus and filler-gap processing
    Morwenna Hoeks (University of Osnabrück), Maziar Toosarvandani, and Amanda Rysling
  • Linguistic boundaries reduce encoding interference in temporal order memory
    Stephanie Rich (Concordia University), Lalitha Balachandran, and Matt Wagers
  • Animacy and long-distance pronominal anaphora in discourse: Evidence from the Maze
    Kelsey Sasaki (Oxford University), Pranav Anand, Amanda Rysling
  • Subject islands are not caused by information structure clashes: evidence from topicalization
    Niko Webster, Matthew Kogan, Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University), Matt Wagers, and Ivy Sichel
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Slugs’ post-grad plans

M.A. student Duygu Demiray accepted an offer to join the Linguistics Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (UMass) to pursue their Ph.D. study.

Max Xie (B.A. 2024) will continue his studies at San Francisco State University in the MA program in English: Concentration in Linguistics.

Colin Hirschberg (B.A. 2023) accepted an offer from Rutgers University to pursue a Ph.D. in Linguistics.

Ashley Ippolito (B.A. 2022) will be joining the Fall 2024 cohort of doctoral students at Florida State for their upcoming Triple L doctoral leadership grant project researching language and literacy development with an emphasis on multilingual learners with the first cohort project focused on Morphological Awareness Pathway to Reading (MAP-R).

Many congrats, and wishing all the graduating slugs the best in their future endeavors!

Successful LURC 2024

On June 7, the annual Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) took place at the London Nelson Center in downtown Santa Cruz. LURC showcases a variety of linguistic research by UCSC undergraduates majoring in Language Studies and Linguistics.

This year’s LURC features nine posters:

  • Monique Aingworth, Julia Helmer, Grace Nighswonger: The impact of coordination ambiguity on garden path sentences
  • Amenia Denson: Mixed directionality in A’ingae nasal spreading
  • Samuel Almer: Pre-nasal raising patterns in California English
  • Killian Kiuttu: Color harmony in Dolgan
  • Amanda Pollem, E.Z. Dashiell, Jennifer Hernandez, Jordy Chanon, Valen Munson: Specificity and constraint in word prediction
  • Cal Boye-Lynn: Chasing phantoms of auditory bias
  • Andrew Kato: Restricting the scope of a relative measure
  • Millie Hacker: The gradual deletion hypothesis: Evidence from variable denasalization in Hixkaryana
  • Benjamin Sommer, Samuel Almer, Michael Proctor (Macquarie University), Rachel Walker (Faculty): Annotating acoustic speech data with MATLAB tools

This year’s distinguished alumni speaker is Prof. Kirby Conrod (BA, 2011, now Assistant Prof. at Swarthmore College), who gave a talk titled “Pronoun Euphoria”.

Congrats to everyone on their achievement, and thank you to all the faculty and volunteers who contributed to organizing the conference!

  • Prof Matt Wagers giving an opening speech as the department chair

Morimoto to Chuo University

Ph.D. alumna (2020) Maho Morimoto recently joined the Faculty of Commerce at Chuo University as an assistant professor.  She will teach English to business, accounting, marketing, and banking students.

From Maho:

Chuo University’s campus is located in the suburb of Tokyo right next to a zoo and is built on a hill, which reminds me a little of the UCSC campus. I will continue my research collaboration with the Speech Communication lab at Sophia University, where I worked for 2 years as a postdoc. If you ever have a chance to visit Tokyo, let me know and we can go on a little nice hike in Mt. Takao!

Many congrats, Maho!

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