Category: Student News

Banana Slugs at UC Berkeley

Andrew Kato and Sadie Lewis, both undergraduate students in the linguistics major, recently returned from UC Berkeley where they presented at the 7th Annual Berkeley Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium, on April 15. They filed the following report with the WHASC Editor:

“With an international group of presenters, topics ranged from American Sign Language phonology to Polynesian thematic suffixes. Sadie’s talk was on eventive ambiguities with noun-adjective pairings, and Andrew’s talk was on discourse-sensitive semantic gender in the DP domain via definite specific singular they. The keynote speaker, Professor Darya Kavitskaya, spoke in detail about her extensive fieldwork on the history of Crimean Tatar.”

Fascinating work, Andrew and Sadie! 

Andrew Kato and Sadie Lewis

Sadie Lewis (left) and Andrew Kato (right) at UC Berkeley

2023 Graduate Research Symposium

Symposium Presenters

Symposium presenters (from left to right): Matthew Kogan, Jun Tamura, Eli Sharf (not present: Jonathan Paramore and Elifnur Ulusoy)

Our annual graduate student research and professionalization seminar (a.k.a. LING 290) culminated this year in a series of presentations by seminar participants on Saturday, April 15. The program included:

  • Eli Sharf “Identificational Appositives in English”
  • Jun Tamura “Compounding Words in the Syntax can Produce Phrasal Phonology: Evidence from Aoyagi Morphemes”
  • Matthew Kogan “The Role of Specifiers in a Content-Addressable Retrieval Mechanism”

Two other participants in LING 290 were unfortunately unable to present at this year’s symposium due to illness. Their planned talks were titled:

  • Jonathan Paramore “Codas are Universally Moraic”
  • Elifnur Ulusoy “The Role of Syntactic Connectivity in Agreement Attraction: Evidence from Turkish”

Congratulations to all the participants in LING 290 for the wonderful progress they’ve made on their research this year!

research symposium

Audience members attentively listening.

Kintz to attend graduate program in speech-language pathology next fall

Photograph of Jane Kintz

Jane Kintz

Jane Kintz, a linguistics major graduating this year, has been accepted to the MS program in speech-language pathology at San José State University and plans on attending in the fall. The WHASC Editor sat down with Jane after the good news to talk about her experience at UC Santa Cruz and her future career.

WHASC Editor: How did you decide to go into speech pathology?

Kintz: I’ve had a passion for languages for many years. While I was living in South Korea studying Korean, I was teaching English to young children and older adults. I realized during that time that although I loved studying languages, I felt most fulfilled sitting with people and helping them develop their ability to communicate and ultimately leaving a lasting impact on people’s lives. Speech pathology is this beautiful area where you use your linguistic knowledge to help improve the quality of people’s lives.

WHASC Editor: How do you think the Linguistics major prepared you for applying and getting accepted to the MS program at SJSU?

Kintz: Being a linguistics major prepared me in a lot of ways. The emphasis on development of critical thinking skills and writing clear analytical essays prepared me for the heavy writing portion of the application process. These skills helped me write a clear, concise and compelling personal statement, which is of major consideration for the program. Also, the content in linguistics classes have direct application to the program. This gives me an interdisciplinary advantage that allows me to bring different perspectives to the program, which I believe helped me get accepted.

WHASC Editor: Do you have a favorite linguistics class? What was it and why?

Kintz: It’s a tie between Phonology 2 and Phonetics 2. I loved Phonology because it almost felt like solving puzzles. And I loved Phonetics because I really enjoyed analyzing spectrograms and learning about sound production.

WHASC Editor: What will you miss most about UCSC?

Kintz: The redwoods for sure. But truly the entire linguistics department, faculty and students. To be in a program with professors and students who are both passionate about the field and deeply curious has been such a gift. I am so grateful for my time here, and UCSC will always hold a special place in my heart.

Best of luck in your future pursuits, Jane!

Another successful LASC

On March 6, the Department hosted its annual Linguistics at Santa Cruz (LASC) conference, attended by prospective graduate students and current students, faculty and alumni. The program included presentations by several graduate students and alumna Anya Hogoboom (PhD, 2006), now Associate Professor at the College of William and Mary. 

The student presentations showcased recent research going on in the department, and sparked lively and insightful discussion during the Q & A:

  • Jack Duff led off the presentations with a talk on “Restricted restriction in the relative clauses of Santiago Laxopa Zapotec.”
  • Niko Webster followed with a talk on “Eventive nominals in Korean and the nature of argument structure.”
  • Lalitha Balachandran and Morwenna Hoeks presented a talk entitled “Does memory for focus structure interfere with memory for prosody?”
  • Dan Brodkin concluded the student presentations with his work on “Locality and extraction in Mandar.”

The Distinguished Alumna Speaker was Professor Anya Hogoboom, whose presentation “Making sense of word-final strength and weakness” argued that strong and weak behavior in final syllables is sensitive to word-final lengthening and is dependent on the role of duration in the phonological phenomenon. 

The LASC dinner and celebration that followed, on the lawn at the Cowell Provost House, was marked by delightful conversations, excellent food, and sweeping views of the Monterey Bay. 

Thank you to all of the students, staff, and faculty who contributed to making this event a success!

LASC presenters

LASC presenters pictured from left to right: Dan Brodkin, Jack Duff, Morwenna Hoeks, Lalitha Balachandran, Niko Webster, and Anya Hogoboom.

Santa Cruz fieldworkers at the SSILA Annual Meeting

SSILA UCSCPhD students Myke Brinkerhoff and Maya Wax Cavallaro co-organized a session on “Engaging the Community: Using Field Methods Classes for Community Outreach,” with linguists at UC Santa Barbara, at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) in late January.

The organized session included presentations and discussions by current graduate students Jack Duff, Delaney Gomez-Jackson, Matthew Kogan, and Claire Miller Willahan, recent alumnus Andrew Hedding (PhD, 2022), Professor Maziar Toosarvandani, and their language expert collaborators Raúl Diaz, Natalia Gracida Cruz, and Fe Silva Robles.

A highlight of the organized session were two hands-on tutorials for creating computer games as a tool for language teaching and revitalization, led by Andrew, Jack, Matthew, and Myke, and a workshop on creating bi-/trilingual storybooks and audiobooks, led by Delaney, Jack, Maya, Myke, and Raúl.

The slides and materials from the event can be found on the organized session website.

 

Banana slugs at CAMP

On the weekend of January 28-29, several UC Santa Cruz psycholinguists presented at this year’s California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP), hosted by UCLA. The conference attendees included graduate students and post-docs from all over the state conducting research in language processing. In addition to Professors Matthew Wagers and Amanda Rysling each chairing a session, the talk schedule was infested with banana slugs:

Long talks:

  • Does memory for focus structure interfere with memory for prosody? Lalitha Balachandran & Morwenna Hoeks
  • Is phonotactic repair of onset clusters modulated by listener expectations? Max Kaplan
  • The Subject-Object Asymmetry in Embedded Questions: Evidence from the Maze, Matthew Kogan
  • Turkish relative clauses and the role of syntactic connectivity in agreement attraction, Elifnur Ulusoy

Poster talks:

Also in attendance were UCSC alumni Ben Eischens (PhD, 2022), Steven Foley (PhD, 2020), and Kelsey Sasaki (PhD, 2021).

 

linguists at camp

From left: Matthew Wagers, Steven Foley, Kelsey Sasaki, Sophia Stremel, Morwenna Hoeks, Max Kaplan, Stephanie Rich, Jack Duff, Lalitha Balachandran, Matthew Kogan, Elifnur Ulusoy, Vishal Arvindam, Amanda Rysling

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