Wax Cavallaro named as finalist at 2024 Grad Slam

On March 2, fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Maya Wax Cavallaro took part in this year’s Grad Slam and made it into the final round of the competition. Her talk was titled Syllables in Our Minds: Evidence from a Learning Experiment (from 1:01:02-1:07:33). Maya went through tough competition and won the Humanities Division preliminaries on Feb 7, securing a spot in the final round to compete with winners from four other divisions (Arts, Engineering, Physical and Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences).

As background, Grad Slam is a communication contest hosted by the UC Santa Cruz (and across all UC campuses) Graduate Division that is open to all graduate students, where participants have a maximum of three minutes to explain their graduate research or artistic endeavor to a general audience.

Congratulations to Maya on her wonderful performance and on showcasing linguistic research to a wide audience!

Morimoto to Chuo University

Ph.D. alumna (2020) Maho Morimoto recently joined the Faculty of Commerce at Chuo University as an assistant professor.  She will teach English to business, accounting, marketing, and banking students.

From Maho:

Chuo University’s campus is located in the suburb of Tokyo right next to a zoo and is built on a hill, which reminds me a little of the UCSC campus. I will continue my research collaboration with the Speech Communication lab at Sophia University, where I worked for 2 years as a postdoc. If you ever have a chance to visit Tokyo, let me know and we can go on a little nice hike in Mt. Takao!

Many congrats, Maho!

Walker gave an invited talk at OCP21

Faculty Rachel Walker was an invited speaker at the Old World Conference in Phonology (OCP) 21 at Leipzig University on February 14-16. She presented a talk titled “Stressed syllables are not singled out for transparency: A gestural account” (see slides).
As an anecdote, the conference included a tour of a cemetery in Leipzig of tombstones for scholars who made historical contributions to the study of linguistics and language (see pictures below). Some of the renowned names are August Leskien, Wilhelm Streitberg, Eduard Sievers, and Wilhelm Wundt.

Walker published in Italian Journal of Linguistics

Faculty Rachel Walker and collaborator Yifan Yang have a recent article titled “Consonant Phonotactics in the Moenat Variety of Ladin” appearing in the Italian Journal of Linguistics.

Here is the paper abstract:

This paper provides a study of consonant phonotactics in the present-day Moenat variety of Ladin. This research focuses on the speech of the current generation of younger adults, based on an investigation with a primary consultant and acoustic recordings of multiple speakers. This work systematically investigates singleton consonants and consonant clusters in each position in the word (initial, medial, final) with accompanying illustrations in example words. An accompanying archive of sound files exemplifies the production of each word by two native speakers, one male and one female. Several phonological patterns involving consonants are discussed, including voicing agreement and place neutralization in preconsonantal sibilants, final obstruent devoicing, and nasal place assimilation. In addition, variation in the realization of sibilants is identified.

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