Category: Alumni News

MORGAN IN AIX-MARSEILLE

Adam Morgan graduated with the MA in Spring 2013 and is now in the PhD program in Psychology at UC San Diego, working in the Language Production Lab. Adam travelled to the University of Aix-Marseille in early September to present joint research with Matt Wagers (on resumption in English) at the annual AMLaP conference (Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing). AMLaP is an international conference which has established itself as the premier European venue for interdisciplinary research into how people process language. Adam and Matt’s poster (Gap Acceptability Predicts Resumption Rates in English) is available in PDF format here.

The research was well-received in a spectacular setting. Adam and Matt’s poster is in the right foreground, with the emblematic banana slug just visible at the top left corner.

DONKA FARKAS and KAREN DUEK AT ESSLLI

The 25th ESSLLI (European Summer School of Language, Logic and Information) was held in Duesseldorf, Germany between August 5th and 16th. As always, ESSLI consisted of two one week sessions, with each course meeting daily. The topics cover Language and Computation, Language and Logic and Logic and Computation. The audience typically consists
of advanced graduate students and faculty members.

Donka Farkas co-taught a course at this year’s event, with Floris Roelofsen, a regular LRC visitor and collaborator with UCSC linguists who now holds a research position at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. The course that Donka and Floris taught was Assertions, questions and hybrids in an inquisitive discourse model. Besides teaching, Donka reports that she audited a course on Speech acts given by Sarah Murray and William Stark (Cornell), enjoyed intense, instructive and fun conversations with students and colleagues, and saw absolutely nothing of Duesseldorf itself.

Karen Duek also attended and enjoyed the event.

The 26th ESSLLI will be held in Tübingen in August of 2014.

RESEARCH OPPORTUNITY FOR UNDERGRADUATES

Dom Massaro, Professor of Psychology and architect of Baldi, a computer-animated talker, has a new research opportunity for undergraduates on relating ease of articulation to children’s vocabulary acquisition. The goal is to mine existing databases that consist of vocabulary development across the first years of life and relate these results to metrics of ease of articulation. Theoretical questions include testing the motor theory of speech perception and whether a similar representation for receptive and expressive language can be assumed. Students would enroll in Psychology 194 (Advanced Research In Special Projects). Dom can be reached at Massaro@ucsc.edu.

MATT TUCKER DEFENDS DISSERTATION

Matt Tucker successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on Thursday June 6th before a committee consisting of Sandy Chung, Jorge Hankamer and Jim McCloskey. Matt’s dissertation is on the syntax of Maltese and the department was honored to welcome representatives of the Maltese community in the Bay Area to the dissertation defense, including the Honorable Louis J. Vella, who is Honorary Consul General of Malta in San Francisco for Northern California and the States of Nevada, Oregon and Hawaii.

Matt has also now accepted an appointment as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Psychology at NYU: Abu Dhabi. Matt will be working directly with Diogo Almeida as a part of the NYU Neuroscience of Language team, which includes Alec Marantz, Liina Pylkkanen and David Poeppel. The Abu Dhabi group focuses on ways to leverage the rich linguistic environment of the United Arab Emirates to study questions about linguistic knowledge and language processing, with a particular focus on the linguistics of the Semitic languages.

AND NEWS FROM ROBYN PERRY

We also have news from Robyn Perry (Linguistics BA, 2008): I wanted to share that I’m starting a 2-year Master in Information Management & Systems program at the UC Berkeley School of Information in August 2013. I’ve been living in Minneapolis for almost the last four years and working for the Progressive Technology Project, an organization that works to make the community organizing sector more effective through appropriate technologies. I’m excited to return to California and sad to leave the great Midwest. But the I School even has a resident linguist in the department (Geoff Nunberg) so I’m looking forward to returning “home” in a number of senses.

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