Category: Faculty News

Over the holidays, Professor Dustin Chacón saw an article—”Using word order cues to predict verb class in L2 Spanish”—come out in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, the premiere journal in second language processing. Dustin shared this report with the Editors about the results, which were the product of a collaboration with his former PhD student Russ Simonsen (now Assistant Professor at Miami University):

Russ and I were interested in the frequently made claim that learners of Spanish struggle with psych verbs, like Me gustan las galletas (me.DAT like the cookies) ‘I like the cookies’, in which the experiencer argument is dative. This seemed unlikely to us, since this is one of the things that Spanish learners are taught very early on. Instead, we suspected that the difficulty might arise from learners not deploying the word order/case of argument NPs as a cue for the likely verb semantics. Following work by Carolina Gattei, we showed that both native Spanish users and highly advanced Spanish learners experience processing difficulty when a dative-first sentence is paired with a non-psych verb: A Juan le saludó María (to-John to-him greeted Mary) ‘Mary greeted John’, and vice versa for a nominative-first sentence paired with a psych verb: María le gustó a Juan (Mary to-him liked to-John) ‘John liked Mary’. But, we found that beginner and intermediate L2 learners do not show this sensitivity in real-time processing. We suggest that learners do likely know the structure of psych-verbs in Spanish, but they have facility in using grammatical cues to predict verb semantics like advanced and L1 Spanish users.

Matt Wagers, Professor and Chair of Linguistics.

Professor Matt Wagers has been awarded $154,659 through the University of California’s prestigious Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) for his team’s project: Leveraging California’s Linguistic Diversity to Improve Large Language Models. The project will address how AI systems can better reflect California’s rich linguistic and neurocognitive diversity, and assess gaps in the accessibility of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, for users outside standard linguistic norms. Capitalizing on a growing network of psycholinguists and language scientists at six other UC campuses, one of the goals of this project is to understand how to create AI tools that are more inclusive and equitable for California’s diverse population. Congratulations, Matt!

Read more about this in the UCSC Newscenter.

A new article by Professor Judith Aissen and coauthor Gilles Polian has appeared in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, entitled “Possessor extraction and categorical subject in Tseltalan”. The abstract follows:

The Tseltalan (Mayan) languages, Tsotsil and Tseltal, have two options for extracting the possessor in wh-questions. Wh-movement can either move the entire possessive phrase (‘pied piping’) or it can move the possessor alone, stranding the possessum. Each option is associated with restrictions related to the specificity of the possessum: stranding is possible only when the possessum is non-specific, pied-piping only when it is specific. We focus primarily on the former restriction. Earlier work on Tsotsil, and the related language, Ch’ol, analyzed the derivation with stranding as involving subextraction, i.e., extraction of an internal possessor. We argue that subextraction is not possible at all in Tseltalan and that therefore only an external possessor can be extracted without pied-piping. It is fairly clear that in transitive clauses, possessors of the internal argument are extracted as external possessors, not internal ones, as they extract only as applied objects in an applicative construction. We extend this analysis to unaccusative clauses, arguing that the possessor of the internal argument in an unaccusative clause, as well as to the possessor within certain prepositional phrases, extracts from an external position. We identify this position as Specifier of TP and propose that the phrase which occupies it is interpreted as the subject of a categorical judgment (Kuroda 1972, among others). This analysis accounts for specificity effects in possessor extraction and illuminates issues related to word order, predicative possession, experiential collocations, and the nature of ’topic’ positions in Mayan.

Professor Dustin Chacón and colleagues just published a new paper ‘MEG evidence for left temporal and orbitofrontal involvement in breaking down inflected words and putting the pieces back together‘ in Cortex! This project was headed by Dave Kenneth Tayao Cayado as part of the SAVaNT project, led by Linnaea Stockall. The study uses MEG to examine grammatical words and ungrammatical pseudowords in Tagalog, providing evidence for a multi-stage processing model of complex words: Morphologically complex words decompose in the left fusiform gyrus, followed by separate stages of category licensing in posterior temporal lobe and semantic interpretation in ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This research is particularly significant since it shows this general model of morphological processing applies to inflectional affixes (not only derivational affixes), and is the first to test this in Tagalog. Congratulations, Dustin! 

Professor Roumi Pancheva in Berlin

This past week, Professor Roumyana Pancheva gave a joint talk with Iliana Krapova (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) on “Bulgarian Language and Generative Grammar” at the “Bulgarian Studies and Contemporary Humanities” conference, hosted by the Bulgarian Cultural Institute and Humboldt University in Berlin, (October 27-28).