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

Kato at UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins

Second-year linguistics undergraduate Andrew Kato wrote to the Editor recently, with an update on ongoing research on epicene pronouns in English and German. Andrew will be presenting the findings from this research at two upcoming undergraduate conferences:

I’m to present at Johns Hopkins next month and at Berkeley in April on research regarding ongoing phenomena in epicene (i.e., gender-indeterminate) anaphora in English:

For additional information, I encourage you to briefly read my abstract for the upcoming Macksey Symposium below:

“In recent years, increasing consensus among English speakers for an inclusive pronoun regardless of gender has materialized in mainstream usage of “they” in singular contexts. Especially among situations in which the gender identity of someone is unknown or nonbinary, opting for “they” — referred to as an epicene pronoun — has increased in both written and spoken English. This development represents one of historically many in English, including the generic “he,” along with more recent neopronoun alternatives. The transition of defaulting to “they” represents an ad-hoc solution to a centuries-old gap in the morphological inventory of English — the absence of a pre-existing epicene-singular pronoun. Moreover, the current decrease of gender-assuming pronoun usage is not isolated. Rather, it falls within both overarching inclusive language reform in English as well as similar transformations in other Germanic languages. Importantly, how can these ongoing developments be grounded in linguistic theory, and how do they interface with morphosyntax and discourse? With this question in mind, this analysis connects the small but growing body of linguistic work on English epicene pronouns to current in-depth theories of anaphora, namely Government and Binding Theory and the more recent Minimalist Program, that have largely yet to be applied to the singular “they.” By relating these diachronic changes to additional Germanic languages such as German, Dutch, and Afrikaans, the phenomena in English epicenity (e.g. plural agreement despite singular antecedents, and mixed acceptability over “themself” versus “themselves”) can serve as a point of comparison extending beyond English itself.”

Exciting work, Andrew!

Jed Pizarro-Guevara receives NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship

Jed

Jed Pizarro-Guevara

Jed Pizarro-Guevara, who received his PhD from UCSC in 2020, has been awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. During the two-year fellowship, he will continue as a member of Professor Brian Dillon’s psycholinguistics lab at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Jed’s dissertation, When human universal meets language specific, was advised by Professor Matt Wagers. His work focuses on sentence processing in a variety of languages, most significantly Tagalog. Check out a description of the project, as well as related project he’s working on, below:

 

My current project (NSF SPRF #2204112) looks at reflexive processing in Tagalog: when Tagalog comprehenders interpret reflexives in real-time, to what extent do they attend to potential antecedents that are not licensed by the grammar? What types of linguistic information do they leverage to guide their interpretation? I’ll be using the visual world paradigm to investigate these questions. I’m currently running large-scale interpretation studies that look at the binding possibilities of reflexive pronouns in the language. These interpretation studies will form the empirical backbone of the visual world studies that I’ll be deploying  at the University of the Philippines Diliman later this year (probably around August/September) and the year after (most likely around the same time). I haven’t been back since summer 2019, so I’m super excited about this research trip. I also get to take a grad student RA with me to assist with data collection. That should be fun! I can’t wait to introduce them to the wonderful people (and food!!) over there! 😄

 

Sort of related to this project is a collaboration I have with Özge Bakay. We’re conceptually replicating Dillon et al. 2013, which used eye-tracking while reading to compare interference effects in English subject-verb and anaphoric dependencies. This is particularly exciting for me because first, I get to work with undergrads again! They’re helping us make the visual world counterpart of the Dillon et al study. Second, we’ll be collecting data using an in-lab eye-tracker and a more portable eye-tracker, like the one that Matt and Maziar have used in z/lab [sentence processing work on Zapotec]! There’s obvious differences between the two (e.g., price, sampling rate, etc.), so we wanted to do an explicit comparison to see how qualitatively similar/comparable the data will be. We will begin data collection this Spring semester (or at least that’s the goal), so stay tuned!
Congrats, Jed!

Eric Potsdam inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America

Eric Potsdam Profile

Professor Eric Potsdam

PhD alumnus Eric Potsdam, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Florida, was recently inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, along with seven of the field’s most eminent linguists. The LSA states that each fellow is inducted “for their distinguished contributions to the discipline.” 

Professor Potsdam received his PhD from the Department in 1996, with a thesis on imperatives, chaired by Professor Judith Aissen. Since then, he has made important contributions to many areas in linguistics and syntactic theory, including ellipsis, exceptives, and the grammar of Austronesian languages. Congratulations, Eric!

Santa Crucians at the LSA Annual Meeting

Picking up a tradition disrupted by the pandemic, current and past members of the Department gathered for the Santa Cruz party at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Denver earlier this month. In attendance on Saturday night, at the lounge atop the conference hotel with sweeping views of the Rocky Mountains, were current faculty Ryan Bennett, Maziar Toosarvandani, and Matt Wagers, joined by graduate alumni Aaron Kaplan (PhD 2008), Chris Kennedy (PhD 1997), and Anissa Zaitsu (BA 2017, MA 2018) and undergraduate alumni Caroline Andrews (BA 2011), Kirby Conrod (BA 2011), Maura O’Leary (BA 2013), and Devin Tankersley (BA 2011).

Also in attendance was a South Bay neighbor, Yining Nie, who recently joined the Department of Linguistics at San José State as an Assistant Professor.

The Santa Cruz party attendees all look forward to reuniting with other members of the UCSC linguistics community at next year’s Annual Meeting in New York.

Slugfest at UCLA

Earlier this quarter, several present and past members of the UC Santa Cruz linguistics community met up at the 2022 American Meeting on Phonology (AMP) at UCLA. The Sunday poster session featured work by current PhD students Dan Brodkin (“Existential Match: Evidence from Mandar”) and Jonathan Paramore (“Toward a uniform moraic quantity principle”), as well as Professor Rachel Walker (“Temporal coordination and markedness in Moenat Ladin consonant clusters,” with Yifan Yang), and the Friday and Saturday sessions saw talks by PhD alumni Aaron Kaplan (“Categorical and gradient constraints on clitic allomorphy,” with Edward Rubin) and Andy Wedel (“The effect of cue-specific lexical competitors on hyperarticulation of VOT and F0 contrasts in Korean stops,” with Cheonkam Jeong) and BA alumnus Eric Bakovic (“Faithfulness and underspecification,” with William Bennett and “SAGUARO: A workbench for phonological theories,” with Eric Meinhardt). The gathering also featured recent PhD alumnus — and now UCLA Assistant Professor — Ben Eischens and first-year grad students Ian Carpick, Duygu Demiray, Larry Lyu, and Richard Wang. A strong showing for the Department, and a memorable event for phonology!

UCSC at AMP 2022

From left: Ben Eischens (PhD Alumnus), Eric Bakovic (BA Alumnus), Dan Brodkin (PhD), Jonathan Paramore (PhD), Rachel Walker (Faculty), Duygu Demiray (MA), Aaron Kaplan (PhD Alumnus), Richard Wang (PhD), Ian Carpick (PhD), and Larry Lyu (MA)

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