Category: Interviews

Professor Dustin Chacón

The Department welcomed a new faculty member this fall, Professor Dustin Chacón, a psycholinguist whose research investigates sentence processing and language acquisition, using neurolinguistic methods (including EEG) with a special emphasis on languages of South Asia.

Now that the academic year has started, the WHASC Editor got the chance to ask Dustin a few questions about his career and research.

How did you get into linguistics?

As cliché as it sounds, I always had some interest in language, and I can’t point to any one particular moment when I decided to become a linguist. Sometime in high school I started learning Japanese and Bengali, but this was sparked by my interest in video games and wanting to gossip in secret with my Bangladeshi-American friends at lunch. But, at some point, I made some friends online who were interested in language and Linguistics (at least two of whom are also professional linguists and friends today). And, I have dim memories of conducting a study in a local kindergarten testing the mutual exclusivity bias in language acquisition for my regional science fair (I did not win). Despite all of this, it wasn’t until I arrived at my undergraduate institution University of Minnesota and took my Introduction to Linguistics class that I actually had any idea what Linguistics even was, or what a career in Linguistics could be. But, suffice to say, I was more than eager to be a student. The rest is history!

What is a project that you are currently working on?

I have an NSF grant with Liina Pylkkänen at NYU investigating the ‘sentence superiority effect’. A number of studies have shown that short sentences (3-5 words long) displayed very quickly, in one glance (200ms) are recalled more accurately than word lists or ungrammatical sentences. This could suggest that there’s some sense in which we can process sentences without necessarily reading them word-by-word, as is commonly assumed in both psycholinguistic theory and methods. But, how does this work? Thinking through this problem really requires us to rethink the relationship between how stimuli are displayed, properties of the visual system, and ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ psycholinguistic mechanisms. In our collaboration, we measure the neural responses during this 200ms glance using electro- and magnetoencephalography (EEG/MEG), and identify a few factors that this neural sentence superiority effect is (and isn’t!) sensitive to. This paradigm can be leveraged to explore lots of different questions about how the brain processes and represents aspects of sentence structure, especially when conducted in parallel to traditional experiment designs. It also challenges us to think more carefully about the psychology of reading and how it relates to the brain’s detection of grammatical structure in words and phrases more generally.

What is a big question in your subdiscipline that excites you, and why?

A long-standing mystery in the cognitive neuroscience of language is whether there are any regions of the brain or patterns of brain activity that specifically correspond to syntax, distinct from compositional semantics, lexical meaning, or morphology. This is motivated by both classic questions about modularity of the mind and why only humans have language as we know it. A few key areas have been identified and studied extensively, but we are still wrapping our heads around the findings as a field. I’m interested in this question because I’m generally interested in syntax and in the brain. But, even more than that, I think there is potential for gaining a deeper understanding of language in the brain. When we study ‘syntax’ in the brain, are we interested in syntactic processes (Merge, Agree), syntactic representations (morphosyntactic features), kinds of phenomena (agreement, movement, case), or computations involved in sentence processing (memory retrieval, prediction)? When we study syntax in the ‘brain’, should the theories be stated at the level of major brain regions (left inferior frontal gyrus, posterior temporal lobe), or distributed patterns of neural activity over time and space? How similar or different is ‘syntax in the brain’ in different languages, exactly? There’s still a lot that we don’t know, and I think we’ll make the most progress with careful consideration of what we’ve learned in linguistic theory and psycholinguistics, and there’s lots of room for creativity in experiment design and theorizing.

What is the most interesting thing you have seen/done/learned about in Santa Cruz so far?

The most exciting thing has been building our new EEG lab space! But perhaps the most interesting thing was the Santa Cruz Ghost Tour, in which I learned which rides and attractions on the Boardwalk are haunted, and our resident ghost pirate ship. I can’t say that I’ve seen any ghosts recently myself, but now I know where to watch out for them!

Welcome to the Department, Dustin!

Last week, the WHASC Editor talked with Mia Gong, who just joined the Department as an Assistant Professor.

Professor Mia Gong

Professor Gong received the PhD in 2022 from Cornell University. Her research, which is in theoretical syntax and the syntax-morphology interface, aims to account for structural variation and typological parallels across languages. It is characterized by a strong commitment to fieldwork, in particular to two Mongolic languages: Dagur and Chakhar Mongolian. Her work has appeared or will soon appear in Linguistic Inquiry and Glossa.

WHASC Editor: How did you get into linguistics?

Gong: I took my first linguistics class in the form of an introductory syntax class while I was studying for my Master’s degree at the University of Delaware. Despite having a rather late start in linguistics, I was immediately drawn to the subject and soon afterwards I decided to pursue linguistics as a career. With the encouragement of my advisors I decided to leave UD to pursue a PhD in linguistics. After moving to Cornell, I had a lot of fun exploring typologically different languages and developed a more general interest in languages of East/Central Asia. 

WHASC Editor: What is a project that you are currently working on?

Gong: One of my current projects is on the same-subject/different-subject constructions in Mongolic languages, which superficially resembles the switch-reference system found in many American languages. I am very excited to be working with native speakers of different Mongolian dialects to test out several hypotheses for this project over the next few weeks. 

WHASC Editor: What is a big question in your subdiscipline that excites you, and why?

Gong: I’ve always been interested in the problems of descriptive and explanatory adequacy. For example, how can our theory be constructed in a way so that it correctly describes the tacit competence of native speakers, while simultaneously providing a principled explanation (independent of any particular language) for the selection of the descriptively adequate grammar? To what extent does our current theory of language qualify as a genuine explanation? While these are familiar problems, they help remind me why I entered the field of linguistics and have always grounded me and kept me going. 

WHASC Editor: What is the most interesting thing you have seen/done/learned about in Santa Cruz so far?

Gong: I would say the nature. I have never lived in a place like Santa Cruz before, and it’s always great to be walking on campus and see the early morning/twilight mist.

We are excited to have you as a member of the Department, Mia!

Professor Christian Ruvalcaba

The WHASC Editor got a chance recently to sit down with Christian Ruvalcaba, who joined the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics this fall as an Assistant Professor. 

Professor Ruvalcaba received the PhD in 2018 from the University of Arizona, and his research investigates morphosyntactic theory, intersections of place identity and language, participatory sociolinguistic research in the southwest, and Indigenous language reconstruction and revitalization. While at Arizona, he coordinated the Language Capital Project, an interactive map of resource centers for speakers of minority languages in Tucson, among other collaborative projects.

WHASC Editor: How did you get into linguistics?

Ruvalcaba: I think I became interested in language as a kid. I grew up in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands where there is a lot of language contact, not just between Spanish and English, but also with Indigenous languages. In Sonora, I attended a bilingual school called Instituto Americano. Bilingual education is common in northern Mexico, and it stems back to the English schools that were set up to educate American children in the decades where Americans took over the region and its industries (mining, railroads, cattle). Despite attending bilingual school, I did not speak English when my family migrated to the US in 1994, and I was put into ESL (at that time, they were using the “pull-out” ESL model). In later years, my sister and I translated for our parents, and I had to learn to read in Spanish on my own. Even though this environment forces you to be constantly aware of language, at the time I wasn’t aware that you could learn about it in school or make a career out of it. In trying to develop my Spanish literacy, I read fiction and poetry from different Latin-American countries. Based on these interests, I decided that I wanted to study literature and philosophy, and I took classes in Irish and British literature at a community college in southern Arizona (unfortunately, there were no Mexican, borderlands, or Chicano literature classes available). Although I really enjoyed these classes, I still wanted to get a deeper understanding of the language structures themselves. Later, I took a class on language and logic, and the instructor told me that I could continue studying similar topics at the University of Arizona (the closest university to the town I lived in). He said that some of his students who had enjoyed the language and logic course went and on to major in linguistics. That was the first time I heard about the field. When I transferred to the university, I switched my focus to linguistics and philosophy. 

WHASC Editor: What is a project that you are currently working on?

Ruvalcaba: There are a couple, and one of them is on the syntax of clausal possession constructions in English. I’m trying to finish an article on this topic based on an analysis developed in my dissertation. A more applied project is related to the revitalization of the Opata languages, specifically Teguima. This is a language that was traditionally spoken in Sonora and Arizona. According to some Mexican scholars, there have been no speakers of the language since the early (or mid) 20th century. Nevertheless, the language has influenced local varieties and is commonly found in local place names. A binational group of people who identify as Opatas or descendants of Opata are trying to recover their language and customs, and the majority of the information about the language comes from archival resources. This includes a description of the language written by the Jesuit priest Natal Lombardo, which was first published in 1702, religious texts, wordlists, and subsequent analyses based on these texts. I am working with a graduate candidate from UT Austin, Michael Everdell, to assist in these efforts by helping folks access relevant resources and files. We have identified a lot of relevant material at the Bancroft Library, so I’m hoping to find ways of making these available to the group I’m working with. I’m hoping to meet students and faculty at UCSC who are interested in collaborating on this project. 

WHASC Editor: What is a big question in your subdiscipline that excites you, and why?

Ruvalcaba: This is a tough question! I’m not sure if this is a really big question, maybe more of an intersection, but the connection between language and space is very exciting to me. Most of my interests seem to stem from or gravitate to this intersection. In other words, how does language represent space (or location, place, paths etc)? How are these constructions extended to more abstract domains, such as possession and experience? Also, how does language contribute to the identity of a place, to the narratives that are associated with it, to its senses of belonging or exclusion? The latter question is also tied to notions of language and power, which has its own very exciting lines of inquiry (particularly in the context of heritage languages). 

WHASC Editor: What is the most interesting thing you have seen/done/learned about in Santa Cruz so far?

Ruvalcaba: I’ve only been here 3 months, so I haven’t gotten a chance to see or do that much. But just seeing and exploring the natural landscape around here has been so interesting, especially coming from the southwest. If I had to pick one thing, I would have to say the fog. I have never experienced or seen anything like it before.  

Welcome to the linguistics community at Santa Cruz, Christian!