Mia Gong at Tu+ 10

Mia Gong at Tu+10

Duygu Demiray presenting their poster

In early March, Professor Mia Gong attended the 10th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic (Tu+ 10) at the University of Southern California, where she delivered two talks, “Specification of D Derives Variation in Relative Clauses” (with Eszter Ótott-Kovács), and “Central Asian Turkic and Khalkha past tense systems arose through balanced Turkic-Mongolic contact” (with Joshua Sims and Jonathan Washington).

While at the conference, Mia also reconnected with UCSC alum Duygu Demiray (MA 2024, now a PhD student at UMass Amherst), who presented their joint project with Professor Matt Wagers “Processing covert dependencies: A study on Turkish wh-in-situ”. 

Byun in Phonology

An article by PhD student Hanyoung Byun recently appeared in the journal Phonology. Coauthored with Jongho Jun, Seon Park, and Yoona Yee, it is entitled, “How tight is the link between alternations and phonotactics?”

This study tests the hypothesis that alternation patterns with strong lexical support are more robust than those with no, or weak, lexical support. Focusing on three alternation patterns in Korean with varying productivity and generality, we measured lexical support in two ways. First, we conducted an acceptability-rating experiment investigating Korean speakers’ judgements on non-words with and without violations of the phonotactic constraints motivating the alternations. In addition, we performed a simulation of learning a maximum entropy (MaxEnt) Harmonic Grammar from a dictionary corpus. The results of the experiment and computational modelling confirmed the hypothesis by showing that if an alternation is robust, its associated phonotactic constraint is learned with a high weight from the MaxEnt simulation, and it affects the participants’ well-formedness ratings for non-words. Consequently, the results of this research support the claim of a tight link between alternations and phonotactics.

Brinkerhoff and McGuire in JASA Express Letters

PhD student Myke Brinkerhoff and Professor Grant McGuire just saw an article, “Using residual H1* for voice quality research”, appear in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,  Express Letters.

One of the most common ways of assessing voice quality is through the spectral slope measure H1*–H2*. However, Chai and Garellek [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 152(3), 1856–1870 (2022)] propose and demonstrate the robustness of a new measure—residual H1*. In this study, we test the reliability of residual H1* in capturing voice quality contrasts in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec. We find that residual H1* is a more robust measure of voice quality than H1*–H2* and can capture the differences in voice quality in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec, which supports the use of this measure in voice quality research.

New Publications from Chacón

Professor Dustin Chacón recently published two articles. The first, “Disentangling semantic prediction and association in processing filler-gap dependencies: An MEG study in English,” co-authored with Liina Pylkkänen (NYU), appeared in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience.

In this study, we examine plausible filler-gap dependencies (‘which counters did the maids clean?’) with sentences that have an unexpected thematic role (‘which mops did the maids clean __ fastidiously?’). We find that neural activity distinguishes these kinds of sentences ~800ms in right inferior frontal cortex. This is longer and in a different location than other plausible/implausible argument-verb relations (‘Do you think maids/mops clean fastidiously?’), which are distinguished ~400ms in left inferior frontal cortex.

The second article, “Evaluating the time courses of morpho-orthographic, lexical, and grammatical processing following rapid parallel visual presentation: An EEG investigation in English,” co-authored with Donnie Dunagan (UGA), Tyson Jordan (UGA), John Hale (UGA/JHU), and Liina Pylkkänen (NYU), appeared in Cognition.

In this paper, we examine how the brain responds to short sentences displayed for 200ms. We found that the brain distinguishes grammatical sentences (the dogs chase a ball) from scrambled alternatives (ball a chase dogs the) around ~300ms. We show that this brain response is different from brain responses sensitive to (il)legal letter strings, morphological form, and word frequency, suggesting a distinct stage of processing grammatical structure in short sentences read quickly.

John Rickford’s Autobiographical Essay Published in Annual Review of Linguistics

Professor John Rickford

The Annual Review of Linguistics has published an autobiographical article by Professor John Rickford, tracing his decades-long career in linguistics. The essay begins with a brief account of Professor Rickford’s time as an undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz, and delves into his research and professional journey across multiple institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Guyana, and Stanford University. The essay also discusses “Activist Sociolinguistics,” with reflections on the development of sociolinguistics and the role of linguistic research in social justice.

Abstract: My autobiographical essay begins with a brief section on my high school experience, then goes into more substantive detail about my research and publications over the past 55 years at the universities I attended (University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Pennsylvania) or at which I worked (University of Guyana, Stanford University) and since I retired in 2019. I mention my key mentors and influencers, including Roger Keesing, J. Herman Blake, Robert Le Page, and William Labov. And I identify some of the foci of my research over the years, including vowel laxing in Guyanese personal pronouns, prior creolization in the history of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), the Ebonics controversy, stylistic variation in sociolinguistics, quotative , and racial disparities in automated speech recognition. Finally, I focus on “Activist Sociolinguistics,” including fighting for increased success for AAVE and other vernacular speakers in schools and for increased justice for them in the courtroom.

Read the full-length article here: [link]

Paramore in Phonology

Fourth-year PhD student Jonathan Paramore had a journal article appear in Phonology in its latest issue: “Codas are universally moraic.”

Mismatches in weight criteria across weight-sensitive processes within individual languages present difficulties for theories of moraic structure, particularly regarding coda weight. Previous accounts, which stipulate that codas are variably moraic to account for the typological variation in the weight status of CVC for primary stress, make incorrect predictions for the status of CVC in other weight-sensitive phenomena, including tone, word minimality and secondary stress, among others. This article proposes a theory of Uniform Moraic Quantity coupled with a new syllable weight metric as a solution, which captures CVC’s flexible weight status while maintaining the cross-linguistic moraicity of codas and avoiding the incorrect predictions that frustrate the standard variable-weight approach.

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