WHAT'S HAPPENING AT SANTA CRUZ
A weekly digest of linguistics news and events from the University of California, Santa Cruz
When Oliver Northrup agreed to accompany department alumna Lauren Winans (UCLA) on a fieldwork trip to Egypt this summer, he did not expect that he would spend much of it at an internet cafe in Spain instead. This week, he shares details about the trip.
Continue Reading GRAD STUDENTS EVACUATED FROM CAIRO THANKS TO UC
Adam Morgan graduated with the MA in Spring 2013 and is now in the PhD program in Psychology at UC San Diego, working in the Language Production Lab. Adam travelled to the University of Aix-Marseille in early September to present joint research with Matt Wagers (on resumption in English) at the annual AMLaP conference (Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing). AMLaP is an international conference which has established itself as the premier European venue for interdisciplinary research into how people process language. Adam and Matt’s poster (Gap Acceptability Predicts Resumption Rates in English) is available in PDF format here.
The research was well-received in a spectacular setting. Adam and Matt’s poster is in the right foreground, with the emblematic banana slug just visible at the top left corner.
Aaron White graduated with the BA in Linguistics from UCSC five years ago. He is now a 4th year graduate student at the University of Maryland and he recently posted this video outlining one of his principal research projects.
Dom Massaro, Professor of Psychology and architect of Baldi, a computer-animated talker, has a new research opportunity for undergraduates on relating ease of articulation to children’s vocabulary acquisition. The goal is to mine existing databases that consist of vocabulary development across the first years of life and relate these results to metrics of ease of articulation. Theoretical questions include testing the motor theory of speech perception and whether a similar representation for receptive and expressive language can be assumed. Students would enroll in Psychology 194 (Advanced Research In Special Projects). Dom can be reached at Massaro@ucsc.edu.
Matt Tucker successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on Thursday June 6th before a committee consisting of Sandy Chung, Jorge Hankamer and Jim McCloskey. Matt’s dissertation is on the syntax of Maltese and the department was honored to welcome representatives of the Maltese community in the Bay Area to the dissertation defense, including the Honorable Louis J. Vella, who is Honorary Consul General of Malta in San Francisco for Northern California and the States of Nevada, Oregon and Hawaii.
Matt has also now accepted an appointment as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Psychology at NYU: Abu Dhabi. Matt will be working directly with Diogo Almeida as a part of the NYU Neuroscience of Language team, which includes Alec Marantz, Liina Pylkkanen and David Poeppel. The Abu Dhabi group focuses on ways to leverage the rich linguistic environment of the United Arab Emirates to study questions about linguistic knowledge and language processing, with a particular focus on the linguistics of the Semitic languages.
Many congratulations to Katia Kravtchenko, who has been offered, and plans to accept, a position with Intel, at their site located in Hudson, MA. Great news!
Spring is a season of many defenses!
Congratulations to Nate Arnett, who successfully passed his qualifying exam with his project “Subject encodings and retrieval interference, evaluating the cost”. The committee was Adrian Brasoveanu, Sandy Chung, Matt Wagers (Chair), and Eve Zyzik (Outside Member). Nate moves to all-but-dissertation (ABD) status!
Sara Cantor successfully defended her qualifying paper and master’s thesis, “Ungrammatical Double-Island Sluicing as a Diagnostic of Left-Branch Positioning”. The committee was Pranav Anand, Sandy Chung, and Jorge Hankamer (Chair). Congratulations!
Tommy Denby successfully defended his master’s thesis, “The Filtering Listener: Dispersion in Exemplar Theory”. The committee was Pranav Anand, Grant McGuire (Co-Chair), and Jaye Padgett (Co-Chair). Congratulations!
Congratulations to Adam Morgan for successfully defending his qualifying paper and master’s thesis, “Bridging the Gap between Production and Judgment of English Resumptive Pronouns. The committee consisted of Pranav Anand, Jim McClosekey, and Matt Wagers (Chair). This project has been accepted as a poster at the Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference this September (AMLaP 2013) in Aix-Marseille Université.
Congratulations to Peter Fabian, who passed his phonology qualifying paper “Iambic-trochaic reversal in Cusco Quechua” on June 6. The committee consisted of Pranav Anand, Armin Mester (chair), and Jaye Padgett.
Clara Sherley-Appel successfully defended her qualifying paper entitled, “Multimodal cue integration in speech processing”. Her QP committee consisted of Adrian Brasoveanu, Grant McGuire (chair), and Jaye Padgett. Congratulations!
