Category: Student News

Byun and Lyu at AMP 2024

Earlier this month, PhD students Hanyoung Byun and Larry Lyu presented posters at the Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) 2024, hosted by Rutgers University. Hanyoung’s poster was entitled “High vowel devoicing in Tohoku Japanese is conditioned by foot structure,” and Larry’s was entitled “[Fricative] as a vowel feature: Evidence from Rudong Chinese.” AMP was well attended by UC Santa Cruz alumni this year. Hanyoung and Larry got the chance to spend time with several of them, including Eric Baković (BA, 1993), Ben Eischens (PhD, 2022), Sara Finley (BA, 2003), Colin Hirschberg (BA, 2024), and Aaron Kaplan (PhD, 2008).

  • Hanyoung Byun presenting his poster
  • Larry Lyu standing next to his poster
  • Sara Finley, Aaron Kaplan, Eric Baković, Ben Eischens, Hanyoung Byun, Larry Lyu (from left to right)

Chacón and Khokhar at SNL 2024

PhD student Hareem Khokhar and Professor Dustin Chacón returned this past week from Brisbane, Australia, where they were presenting their work at the annual meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language. 

Together, Dustin and Hareem presented three posters (with co-authors): 

  • “Readers extract some grammatical information in a single fixation, across sentence structures”
    Dustin A. Chacón, Donald G. Dunagan, and Tyson Jordan
  • “Quick, don’t move! Wh-movement and wh-in-situ structures in rapid parallel reading—EEG studies in English, Urdu, and Mandarin Chinese”
    Hareem Khokhar, Jill McLendon, Donald G. Dunagan, Zahin Hoque, Tyson Jordan, and Dustin A. Chacón
  • “Whisps and whispers in the brain: A crossmodal investigation into morphological decomposition”
    Tyson Jordan, Donald G. Dunagan, and Dustin A. Chacón
  • Dustin Chacón and Hareem Khokhar at SNL 2024
    Dustin Chacón and Hareem Khokhar
  • Hareem Khokhar presenting
    Hareem Khokhar presenting a poster
  • Dustin Chacón presenting
    Dustin Chacón presenting a poster

Katson at NELS55

This past week, PhD student Aidan Katson gave a talk on their work, “Event Containers,” at the 55th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 55), hosted by Yale University. Aidan also had the opportunity to reconnect with some Santa Cruz alumni: Peter Svenonius (PhD, 1994), now at the University of Tromsø, and Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022), currently at the University of Washington.

Aidan Katson delivering their talk at NELS55

From left to right: Aidan Katson (current PhD student), Peter Svenonius (PhD, 1994), Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022)



Law, Sharf, and Tamura at Sinn und Bedeutung 29 (SuB29)

Over the summer, Professor Jess Law, along with PhD students Eli Sharf and Jun Tamura, attended Sinn und Bedeutung 29 (SuB29), held in the picturesque town of Noto, Sicily, Italy. 

Eli delivered a solo talk on “Speech Acts Without Sincerity: An Analysis of Parenthetical Say in English.” Jess, along with Professor Haoze Li, presented a joint talk titled “Discourse Dynamics as a Cure to the Problem of Too Many Uniqueness Conditions.” Jun presented two posters: one solo poster on “Relative Readings of Japanese ichiban Superlatives” and a joint poster also with Haoze titled “Embedded Questions as Definite Descriptions: An Insight from Japanese.” 

In addition to exciting intellectual exchanges, they had the pleasure of reconnecting with some UC Santa Cruz alumni: Lisa Hofmann (currently a postdoctoral researcher at University of Stuttgart), Kelsey Sasaki (currently a research fellow at University of Oxford), and Kyle Rawlins (Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University).

From left to right: Jess Law, Lisa Hofmann, Kelsey Sasaki, Eli Sharf
Jun Tamura presenting his poster



Santa Crucians at AMLaP 30

In September, the 30th Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) conference took place at the University of Edinburgh, with many current and former students and faculty of the Department presenting posters or talks:

  • Linguistic boundaries delineate contextual domains in memory
    Lalitha Balachandran and Matt Wagers
  • Beyond the left hemisphere: MEG evidence for right temporal lobe recruitment in Bangla morphosyntax processing
    Dustin Chacón, with     Swarnendu Moitra and Linnaea Stockall
  • Breaking down inflected words and putting the pieces back together involve the left occipitotemporal and orbitofrontal regions: MEG evidence from Tagalog
    Dustin Chacón, with Dave Kenneth Cayado, Samantha Wray, Marco Chia-Ho Lai, Suhail Matar, and Linnaea Stockall
  • Processing covert dependencies: A study on Turkish wh-in-situ
    Duygu Demiray (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Matt Wagers
  • Effects of foil processing, decision-making, and initial attention in the Maze task
    Jack Duff (Saarland University), Pranav Anand, and Amanda Rysling
  • Deprioritizing linguistic material: The role of givenness on focus and filler-gap processing
    Morwenna Hoeks (University of Osnabrück), Maziar Toosarvandani, and Amanda Rysling
  • Linguistic boundaries reduce encoding interference in temporal order memory
    Stephanie Rich (Concordia University), Lalitha Balachandran, and Matt Wagers
  • Animacy and long-distance pronominal anaphora in discourse: Evidence from the Maze
    Kelsey Sasaki (Oxford University), Pranav Anand, Amanda Rysling
  • Subject islands are not caused by information structure clashes: evidence from topicalization
    Niko Webster, Matthew Kogan, Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University), Matt Wagers, and Ivy Sichel
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Tamura and Webster at SICOGG/WAFL

Image of Jun Tamura, Haoze Li, and Niko Webster (from left to right)

Jun Tamura, Haoze Li, and Niko Webster (from left to right)

Over the summer, PhD students Jun Tamura and Niko Webster traveled to Jeonju, South Korea to attend a joint meeting of the Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar and the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics, which took place at Jeonbuk National University in August. Niko presented a talk titled “Acategorial licensing of internal arguments in Korean”. Jun presented a solo talk on “Superlatives without degree abstraction: Ichiban superlatives in Japanese,” as well as a joint talk with Professor Haoze Li, a recent Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department and now Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University.

Ian Carpick at LabPhon

In late June, PhD Student Ian Carpick attended the 19th Conference on Laboratory Phonology: LabPhon 19 in Korea, where he presented his poster, “Learned performance or auditory bias: carryover vs. anticipatory nasal coarticulation,” based on his first Qualifying Paper (QP) project. Shortly after, Ian successfully defended his QP by Zoom. The committee comprised Ryan Bennett, Grant McGuire, and Amanda Rysling, who chaired the QP. Congratulations, Ian!

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