Category: Faculty News

Banana Slugs at HSP

UC Santa Cruz was well represented at the 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, held March 27-29 at the University of Maryland. A number of undergraduates and graduates were there to present their research, including Matthew Kogan, Joshua Lieberstein, Subhekshya Shrestha, and Ruoqing Yao. They were joined by current faculty members Dustin Chacón, Amanda Rysling, and Matt Wagers.

They ran into many grad alumni, including Jack Duff (PhD, 2023) and Duygu Demiray (MA, 2024), undergrad alumni/current Baggett Fellows Jackson Confer (BA, 2022) and Sadie Lewis (BA, 2023), as well as former LRC visitor Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University). Two other slugs, 2011 BA alum Caroline Andrews (Zurich) and 2013 MA alum Adam Morgan (NYU Langone), anchored a well-attended and engaging plenary session featuring field psycholinguistics on the last day. They presented their research on case and sentence planning in Shipibo (Andrews) and the comprehension and production of switch reference in Nungon (Morgan). Despite the riveting science, it seems everyone found an opportunity to slip out in the warm weather to see the cherry blossoms or at least to rub Testudo for good luck.

Presentations by current members of the department: 

and those by our alumni:

Banana Slugs at Tromsø Workshop on Phonological Domains

From right to left: Junko Ito, Nick Kalivoda, Martin Krämer, Peter Svenonius, Maya Wax Cavarello, Armin Mester

On March 13–14, a group of Santa Cruz linguists participated in the workshop Exploring Boundaries: Phonological Domains in the Languages of the World, held at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø—the northernmost university in the world.

Professor Junko Ito and Professor Armin Mester gave a talk entitled “Prosodic Windows as Tonal Domains: The Case of Kagoshima Japanese”.

Current PhD student Maya Wax Cavallaro presented her work titled “Evidence for the Syllable in Domain Generalization”.

Junko, Armin, and Maya also reconnected with Martin Krämer (UCSC LRC Research Associate, 2015), now Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT and a co-organizer of the workshop; Nick Kalivoda (PhD 2018), who presented on “Linear and Structural (A)symmetries in Syntax-Prosody Mapping”; and Peter Svenonius (PhD 1994), now Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT, who presented on “Words, Phrases, and the ‘Accentual Complex’ in Iron Ossetic” (joint work with Patrik Bye). 



Mia Gong at Tu+ 10

Mia Gong at Tu+10

Duygu Demiray presenting their poster

In early March, Professor Mia Gong attended the 10th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic (Tu+ 10) at the University of Southern California, where she delivered two talks, “Specification of D Derives Variation in Relative Clauses” (with Eszter Ótott-Kovács), and “Central Asian Turkic and Khalkha past tense systems arose through balanced Turkic-Mongolic contact” (with Joshua Sims and Jonathan Washington).

While at the conference, Mia also reconnected with UCSC alum Duygu Demiray (MA 2024, now a PhD student at UMass Amherst), who presented their joint project with Professor Matt Wagers “Processing covert dependencies: A study on Turkish wh-in-situ”. 

Brinkerhoff and McGuire in JASA Express Letters

PhD student Myke Brinkerhoff and Professor Grant McGuire just saw an article, “Using residual H1* for voice quality research”, appear in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,  Express Letters.

One of the most common ways of assessing voice quality is through the spectral slope measure H1*–H2*. However, Chai and Garellek [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 152(3), 1856–1870 (2022)] propose and demonstrate the robustness of a new measure—residual H1*. In this study, we test the reliability of residual H1* in capturing voice quality contrasts in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec. We find that residual H1* is a more robust measure of voice quality than H1*–H2* and can capture the differences in voice quality in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec, which supports the use of this measure in voice quality research.

New Publications from Chacón

Professor Dustin Chacón recently published two articles. The first, “Disentangling semantic prediction and association in processing filler-gap dependencies: An MEG study in English,” co-authored with Liina Pylkkänen (NYU), appeared in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience.

In this study, we examine plausible filler-gap dependencies (‘which counters did the maids clean?’) with sentences that have an unexpected thematic role (‘which mops did the maids clean __ fastidiously?’). We find that neural activity distinguishes these kinds of sentences ~800ms in right inferior frontal cortex. This is longer and in a different location than other plausible/implausible argument-verb relations (‘Do you think maids/mops clean fastidiously?’), which are distinguished ~400ms in left inferior frontal cortex.

The second article, “Evaluating the time courses of morpho-orthographic, lexical, and grammatical processing following rapid parallel visual presentation: An EEG investigation in English,” co-authored with Donnie Dunagan (UGA), Tyson Jordan (UGA), John Hale (UGA/JHU), and Liina Pylkkänen (NYU), appeared in Cognition.

In this paper, we examine how the brain responds to short sentences displayed for 200ms. We found that the brain distinguishes grammatical sentences (the dogs chase a ball) from scrambled alternatives (ball a chase dogs the) around ~300ms. We show that this brain response is different from brain responses sensitive to (il)legal letter strings, morphological form, and word frequency, suggesting a distinct stage of processing grammatical structure in short sentences read quickly.

Gong in Linguistic Inquiry

The winter issue of Linguistic Inquiry included a new journal article by Professor Mia Gong: “Case in wholesale late merger: Evidence from Mongolian scrambling“.

Takahashi and Hulsey (2009) suggest that wholesale late merger is controlled by case. This article presents novel evidence for this idea from Condition C reconstruction effects in Mongolian local and long-distance scrambling. Departing from previous accounts, I argue that the complexity of the phenomenon reveals that Condition C connectivity is related neither to the position of underlying binders nor to A/Ā-properties—scrambling bleeds Condition C, so long as the case requirement of the late-merged NP can be satisfied. Crucially, I motivate a hybrid case system for Mongolian in which accusative case is assigned as a dependent case. I show that this is both necessary and independently motivated, thereby introducing a fine-grained view of case into the wholesale-late-merger mechanism.

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