Category: Faculty News

Successful BayPhon 2025

On May 10, 2025, UCSC Linguistics hosted BayPhon, a meeting that brought together about 35 faculty and students in the broader Bay area (San José State, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz) to present their work on phonetics and phonology. 

Those in attendance enjoyed a day of abundant sun, with exceptional views across Monterey Bay during lunch, and basked in the light of 11 inspiring presentations and warm conversations. Many thanks to the students and faculty who organized the event, especially the primary organizers: PhD students Hanyoung Byun, Richard Wang, and Professor Rachel Walker. 

UCSC researchers were among those presenting at the workshop:

  • Myke Brinkerhoff presented a talk titled “The acoustics landscape of voice quality.”
  • Hanyoung Byun presented a poster titled “Lenis obstruent voicing in Seoul Korean: Phonological or phonetic?”
  • Ian Carpick presented a talk titled “Deriving vowel reduction from a law governing human motion.”

Thanks to Jungu Kang for taking photos throughout the workshop. Some highlights are below:

  • PhD Student Ian Carpick
  • PhD Student Hanyoung Byun
  • PhD Student Myke Brinkerhoff
  • Professor Rachel Walker at the poster session with presenters

Recent faculty publications in phonology and phonetics

The past year has seen a spate of faculty publications in phonology and phonetics. Two are a product of collaborations between Professors Ryan Bennett, Grant McGuire, and Jaye Padgett and co-authors. One, “Effects of syllable position and place of articulation on secondary dorsal contrasts: An ultrasound study of Irish” (Journal of Phonetics, vol. 107), co-authored with Jenny Bellik (PhD, 2019), shows that the Irish palatalization contrast is produced less robustly in syllable codas than in onsets, and more variably in labial consonants and in codas. These results are related to cross-linguistic asymmetries in the occurrence of a palatalization contrast. The second, “Russian palatalization is a matter of the tongue body” (Journal of Slavic Linguistics, vol. 32) argues what its title says and against alternative accounts that view the Russian contrast as primarily one involving pharyngealization or [ATR].

Jaye also saw another article come out over the past year, also a collaboration with co-authors. “An acoustic study of ATR in Tima vowels: Vowel quality, voice quality and duration” (Phonology, vol. 41, e2) provides an acoustic analysis of the ATR contrast in Tima, a very understudied language of Sudan, and shows that voice quality is implicated in the contrast along with the more familiar F1 differences.

Anand, Hardt, and McCloskey in LI

The most recent issue of Linguistic Inquiry (volume 56, issue 2) has just appeared and it contains a paper by Professors Pranav Anand, Dan Hardt, and Jim McCloskey called “The Domain of Formal Matching in Sluicing.” This paper, like the 2019 paper by Deniz Rudin (PhD, 2018; USC) that it replies to and builds on (“Head-Based Syntactic Identity in Sluicing,” which also appeared in Linguistic Inquiry), emerged from the Santa Cruz Ellipsis Project, a project funded by the National Science Foundation which was active in the department between 2013 and 2019.

Santa Cruz linguists at WCCFL

The 43rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 43) took place a couple weekends ago at the University of Washington (April 25-27), with several Santa Crucians in attendance.

PhD student Aidan Katson gave a talk on Korean honorification as a window to understanding animacy,” while PhD student Niko Webster presented a poster on “The syntactic and semantic introduction of internal arguments.” Professor Mia Gong gave a talk on “Specification of D Derives Variation in Relative Clauses” (with Eszter Ótott-Kovács) and presented a poster, “Scrambling through the Looking Glass: Two Types of Movement across Weak Islands.” Professor Maziar Toosarvandani was also in attendance as an audience member.

The Santa Cruz students and faculty got a chance to catch up with some past members of the department. Professor Ruth Kramer (PhD, 2009; Georgetown) gave a talk on “Passivization, speech act participants, and third-person probes in Jarawara” (with Luke Adamson). Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv), a recent visitor in the Department, co-presented a talk, “The bilingual lexicon under Distributed Morphology: An investigation of gender agreement in code-switching.” Professor Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022), now an Assistant Professor at UW, was on hand as one of the conference’s organizers.

Santa Cruz linguists at the poster session
Santa Cruz linguists at the conference dinner
Niko Webster presenting his poster
Mia Gong in front of her poster
Andrew Hedding helping put up Mia’s poster
Aidan Katson giving their talk

Colloquium: Matt Wagers

Last Friday, the Department held a colloquium with Professor Matt Wagers as the invited speaker. Matt’s talk was entitled “Setting healthy (mnemonic) boundaries”:

Nearly 20 years ago, Lewis & Vasishth (2005) applied the ACT-R modeling framework to language processing by creating an English parser fragment embedded in an associative memory. McElree (2000) and McElree, Foraker & Dyer (2003) informed this development by providing earlier arguments in favor of such a content-addressable memory. This proved to be hugely influential because it offered a general theory of dependency resolution which could be made precise by reference to any particular theory of linguistic features. Both strands of thought reoriented thinking in the field away from models of working memory that required serial search procedures and, generally, the discovery of widespread interference effects has vindicated that shift. Much recent research has made progress in delineating what the representations are (Yadav et al. 2023, Keshev et al. 2025) and how they can be learned in an unsupervised manner (Ryu & Lewis 2021). Relatively unexplored is how to characterize the information that can be attended to simultaneously, sometimes called the “focus of attention” (Oberauer & Hein 2012). This is an important commitment of models like ACT-R and provides an attractive point of articulation to theories of locality or linguistic domains. In this talk, I will survey what we know (and don’t know) about the focus of attention in language processing (Wagers & McElree 2013, 2022) and relate it to recent thinking about the dynamics of context encoding (Healey, Long & Kahana 2019; Balachandran, Wagers & Rich 2025).

After the colloquium, students and faculty took a walk down by the ocean at the Coastal Sciences Campus, where a pod of whales was spotted, as well as at least one otter (photo courtesy of Jungu Kang).

A sea otter

Banana Slugs at GLOW, PLC, and TEAL

Over spring break, linguistics students and faculty were busy presenting posters and talks across the globe:

  • Professor Mia Gong and PhD student Niko Webster attended the 14th Workshop on Theoretical East Asian Linguistics (TEAL), hosted by USC on March 18-20. Mia gave an invited talk, “Two types of long distance scrambling in Khalkha Mongolian,” while Niko gave a talk entitled “Internal argument introduction in Korean complex predicates.”
  • Several UC Santa Cruz linguists attended the main colloquium of the 47th Annual Meeting of Generative Linguistics in the Old World) in Frankfurt am Main at Goethe University on March 25-27. Niko Webster and Professor Ivy Sichel gave a long talk entitled “Information structure alone cannot account for subject islandhood: An experimental study,” where they presented on collaborative work with Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University), Matthew Kogan, and Matt Wagers. PhD Student Yaqing Cao gave a lightning talk and poster presentation on “Scope reconstruction in head movements as featural valuations.” While there, they reconnected with Anissa Zaitsu (BA 2017, MA 2018, currently a PhD student at Stanford).
  • Yaqing Cao gave a talk at the 49th Penn Linguistics Conference (PLC), entitled “Ability modal, negation, causation: How to derive the (anti)-actuality entailments?” on April 5-6.
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