Category: Alumni News

Banana slugs at CAMP

On the weekend of January 28-29, several UC Santa Cruz psycholinguists presented at this year’s California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP), hosted by UCLA. The conference attendees included graduate students and post-docs from all over the state conducting research in language processing. In addition to Professors Matthew Wagers and Amanda Rysling each chairing a session, the talk schedule was infested with banana slugs:

Long talks:

  • Does memory for focus structure interfere with memory for prosody? Lalitha Balachandran & Morwenna Hoeks
  • Is phonotactic repair of onset clusters modulated by listener expectations? Max Kaplan
  • The Subject-Object Asymmetry in Embedded Questions: Evidence from the Maze, Matthew Kogan
  • Turkish relative clauses and the role of syntactic connectivity in agreement attraction, Elifnur Ulusoy

Poster talks:

Also in attendance were UCSC alumni Ben Eischens (PhD, 2022), Steven Foley (PhD, 2020), and Kelsey Sasaki (PhD, 2021).

 

linguists at camp

From left: Matthew Wagers, Steven Foley, Kelsey Sasaki, Sophia Stremel, Morwenna Hoeks, Max Kaplan, Stephanie Rich, Jack Duff, Lalitha Balachandran, Matthew Kogan, Elifnur Ulusoy, Vishal Arvindam, Amanda Rysling

Jed Pizarro-Guevara receives NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship

Jed

Jed Pizarro-Guevara

Jed Pizarro-Guevara, who received his PhD from UCSC in 2020, has been awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. During the two-year fellowship, he will continue as a member of Professor Brian Dillon’s psycholinguistics lab at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Jed’s dissertation, When human universal meets language specific, was advised by Professor Matt Wagers. His work focuses on sentence processing in a variety of languages, most significantly Tagalog. Check out a description of the project, as well as related project he’s working on, below:

 

My current project (NSF SPRF #2204112) looks at reflexive processing in Tagalog: when Tagalog comprehenders interpret reflexives in real-time, to what extent do they attend to potential antecedents that are not licensed by the grammar? What types of linguistic information do they leverage to guide their interpretation? I’ll be using the visual world paradigm to investigate these questions. I’m currently running large-scale interpretation studies that look at the binding possibilities of reflexive pronouns in the language. These interpretation studies will form the empirical backbone of the visual world studies that I’ll be deploying  at the University of the Philippines Diliman later this year (probably around August/September) and the year after (most likely around the same time). I haven’t been back since summer 2019, so I’m super excited about this research trip. I also get to take a grad student RA with me to assist with data collection. That should be fun! I can’t wait to introduce them to the wonderful people (and food!!) over there! 😄

 

Sort of related to this project is a collaboration I have with Özge Bakay. We’re conceptually replicating Dillon et al. 2013, which used eye-tracking while reading to compare interference effects in English subject-verb and anaphoric dependencies. This is particularly exciting for me because first, I get to work with undergrads again! They’re helping us make the visual world counterpart of the Dillon et al study. Second, we’ll be collecting data using an in-lab eye-tracker and a more portable eye-tracker, like the one that Matt and Maziar have used in z/lab [sentence processing work on Zapotec]! There’s obvious differences between the two (e.g., price, sampling rate, etc.), so we wanted to do an explicit comparison to see how qualitatively similar/comparable the data will be. We will begin data collection this Spring semester (or at least that’s the goal), so stay tuned!
Congrats, Jed!

Eric Potsdam inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America

Eric Potsdam Profile

Professor Eric Potsdam

PhD alumnus Eric Potsdam, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Florida, was recently inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, along with seven of the field’s most eminent linguists. The LSA states that each fellow is inducted “for their distinguished contributions to the discipline.” 

Professor Potsdam received his PhD from the Department in 1996, with a thesis on imperatives, chaired by Professor Judith Aissen. Since then, he has made important contributions to many areas in linguistics and syntactic theory, including ellipsis, exceptives, and the grammar of Austronesian languages. Congratulations, Eric!

Santa Crucians at the LSA Annual Meeting

Picking up a tradition disrupted by the pandemic, current and past members of the Department gathered for the Santa Cruz party at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Denver earlier this month. In attendance on Saturday night, at the lounge atop the conference hotel with sweeping views of the Rocky Mountains, were current faculty Ryan Bennett, Maziar Toosarvandani, and Matt Wagers, joined by graduate alumni Aaron Kaplan (PhD 2008), Chris Kennedy (PhD 1997), and Anissa Zaitsu (BA 2017, MA 2018) and undergraduate alumni Caroline Andrews (BA 2011), Kirby Conrod (BA 2011), Maura O’Leary (BA 2013), and Devin Tankersley (BA 2011).

Also in attendance was a South Bay neighbor, Yining Nie, who recently joined the Department of Linguistics at San José State as an Assistant Professor.

The Santa Cruz party attendees all look forward to reuniting with other members of the UCSC linguistics community at next year’s Annual Meeting in New York.

Slugfest at UCLA

Earlier this quarter, several present and past members of the UC Santa Cruz linguistics community met up at the 2022 American Meeting on Phonology (AMP) at UCLA. The Sunday poster session featured work by current PhD students Dan Brodkin (“Existential Match: Evidence from Mandar”) and Jonathan Paramore (“Toward a uniform moraic quantity principle”), as well as Professor Rachel Walker (“Temporal coordination and markedness in Moenat Ladin consonant clusters,” with Yifan Yang), and the Friday and Saturday sessions saw talks by PhD alumni Aaron Kaplan (“Categorical and gradient constraints on clitic allomorphy,” with Edward Rubin) and Andy Wedel (“The effect of cue-specific lexical competitors on hyperarticulation of VOT and F0 contrasts in Korean stops,” with Cheonkam Jeong) and BA alumnus Eric Bakovic (“Faithfulness and underspecification,” with William Bennett and “SAGUARO: A workbench for phonological theories,” with Eric Meinhardt). The gathering also featured recent PhD alumnus — and now UCLA Assistant Professor — Ben Eischens and first-year grad students Ian Carpick, Duygu Demiray, Larry Lyu, and Richard Wang. A strong showing for the Department, and a memorable event for phonology!

UCSC at AMP 2022

From left: Ben Eischens (PhD Alumnus), Eric Bakovic (BA Alumnus), Dan Brodkin (PhD), Jonathan Paramore (PhD), Rachel Walker (Faculty), Duygu Demiray (MA), Aaron Kaplan (PhD Alumnus), Richard Wang (PhD), Ian Carpick (PhD), and Larry Lyu (MA)

UC Santa Cruz Linguists at CreteLing

There was a large UCSC contingent at CreteLing 2022 this year, the annual linguistics summer school hosted at the University of Crete in beautiful Rethymno. Two current faculty members, Professors Ivy Sichel and Donka Farkas, and incoming faculty member Professor Roumyana Pancheva, taught classes over the two-week program. Nine students from UCSC, both undergraduate and graduate, attended these classes and others. Here are some quotes from participants about their favorite part of the program:

UCSC linguists at the Port of Rethymno

UCSC students and professors at the Port of Rethymno. From left clockwise: Owen O’Brien (senior), Sophia Stremel (PhD), Sadie Lewis (senior), Donka Farkas (faculty), Eli Sharf (PhD), Jackson Confer (alum), Matthew Kogan (MA), Roumyana Pancheva (faculty), Ivy Sichel (faculty), and Niko Webster (PhD).

“Easily, the best part was getting to know so many brilliant professors and students from around the world, both in the classroom and out. Conversations with new friends were consistently insightful and rewarding, and I loved being able to explore the island during down time and end the days with good food and night swims in such great company.” – Jackson Confer, alum

“At CreteLing, I enjoyed many of the meals we shared together, lunch between classes, and late-night dinners, where everyone was welcome and we seemed to keep cramming chairs around the table. Some of the most exciting conversations were had over a great meal and a view of the Mediterranean.” – Sadie Lewis, senior

“I really enjoyed going out with our big Santa Cruz cohort to enjoy the tremendous food and culture in Crete. I was quite excited to be thinking about Linguistics with everyone in this very vacation-esque setting.” – Matthew Kogan, 2nd year MA

Donka and Sabine at the final dinner.

Donka Farkas, Professor Emerita at UCSC and Sabine Iatridou, Professor at MIT and Co-Director of CreteLing

“It was pure joy to be in a real classroom with real live students again.  I loved interacting with the large and lively UCSC contingent, in class, at Brew your Mind cafe, on the bus, or even during a brief forced march from the classroom to the bus station.” – Donka Farkas, Professor Emerita

“I enjoyed dancing: whether in the club or in the streets!” – Owen O’Brien, senior

“Wednesday was our off-day in the middle of the week. I loved going to the local beach and swimming in the warm Mediterranean on this day, having some time to enjoy the sun and think about ideas I learned in class the previous few days.” – Eli Sharf, 2nd year PhD 

Delaney Gomez-Jackson on a bus.

UCSC MA student Delaney Gomez-Jackson enjoying the bus ride back to downtown Rethymno after a long day of classes

UCSC linguists at the Final Dinner

UCSC students celebrating at the dinner and dance party hosted on the final night of the program. From left clockwise: Sadie Lewis (senior), Sophia Stremel (PhD), Matthew Kogan (MA), Jackson Confer (alum), Owen O’Brien (senior), Elifnur Ulusoy (MA), Niko Webster (PhD), and Eli Sharf (PhD).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pictures of the University of Crete

A collage of film photos of the Rethymno campus taken by Delaney Gomez-Jackson.

Hangout out in Crete

Niko Webster (left), Owen O’Brien (right, back), and Sadie Lewis (right, front) hang out and drink coffee in front of the common room during a class break.

 

 

 

 

 

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