Chacón in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

Over the holidays, Professor Dustin Chacón saw an article—”Using word order cues to predict verb class in L2 Spanish”—come out in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, the premiere journal in second language processing. Dustin shared this report with the Editors about the results, which were the product of a collaboration with his former PhD student Russ Simonsen (now Assistant Professor at Miami University):

Russ and I were interested in the frequently made claim that learners of Spanish struggle with psych verbs, like Me gustan las galletas (me.DAT like the cookies) ‘I like the cookies’, in which the experiencer argument is dative. This seemed unlikely to us, since this is one of the things that Spanish learners are taught very early on. Instead, we suspected that the difficulty might arise from learners not deploying the word order/case of argument NPs as a cue for the likely verb semantics. Following work by Carolina Gattei, we showed that both native Spanish users and highly advanced Spanish learners experience processing difficulty when a dative-first sentence is paired with a non-psych verb: A Juan le saludó María (to-John to-him greeted Mary) ‘Mary greeted John’, and vice versa for a nominative-first sentence paired with a psych verb: María le gustó a Juan (Mary to-him liked to-John) ‘John liked Mary’. But, we found that beginner and intermediate L2 learners do not show this sensitivity in real-time processing. We suggest that learners do likely know the structure of psych-verbs in Spanish, but they have facility in using grammatical cues to predict verb semantics like advanced and L1 Spanish users.

Alumni interview with Jack Duff

Jack Duff

Jack Duff

The WHASC Editors recently got a chance to catch up with Jack Duff, who received his PhD from the Department in 2023. His dissertation (coadvised by Pranav Anand and Amanda Rysling) was entitled “On the timing of decisions about meaning during incremental comprehension.” Since graduating, he has been a Postdoctoral Researcher at Saarland University, where he has continued his psycholinguistic research on the processing and representation of linguistic meaning.

Can you share a bit about your journey from UCSC to your current position at Saarland University?

In May 2023, while I was beginning to write my dissertation, I saw a grant-funded post-doc position advertised here at Saarland with Vera Demberg’s group, on developing computational cognitive models of pragmatic processing. I was a big fan of some of the group’s recent work, and I had already been thinking about computational modeling as another tool I wanted in my toolkit, so it was too good an opportunity to pass up. It wasn’t a perfect match though: the start date was just a few months away, and despite my interest, I hadn’t yet taken on any serious modeling work myself. Still, I sent in a quick application.

After an interview and a job talk over Zoom, I was offered a 2-year position. Thankfully, we were able to negotiate a start date, January 2024, that left me a few extra months to use up my current funding, and finish my dissertation. I did, and since then, I’ve been here in Germany, getting serious about computational modeling, starting projects with this group, and teaching bachelors and masters students in the computational linguistics program, while continuing my other collaborations with people at UCSC and beyond.

What aspects of your graduate studies were most influential in shaping your research career?

I was tremendously lucky at UCSC to work with advisors and mentors on projects across many disciplines. I couldn’t do the work I do today if I didn’t have the diverse practical experience and support that came from those relationships: scheming up processing theories with insight from general cognition with Amanda, building generalizations from careful consideration of heaps of individual examples with Pranav, identifying and honing the core of a argument with Maziar and Ivy, unearthing patterns of data and ideas in unlikely places with Matt and Sandy, keeping pace with new developments in cognitive science with Adrian, the list goes on! No project could ever combine all the research questions I worked on during my PhD, but every project I take on these days benefits from all of those skills.

How has your research focus evolved since you graduated from UCSC? Are there any new areas in linguistics that you’re excited to explore?

As I hoped when I took the job, in my work here at Saarland I’ve been able to work with some new methods in computational modeling for psycholinguistic theories. For instance, in one of my recent projects, I’ve been building models with the cognitive architecture ACT-R to simulate how individual differences in general problem-solving strategies could determine individual differences in responses and response times in an ad-hoc implicature task. I find that these tools don’t change the focus of my work, but they allow a way to formalize and generate exact predictions from hypotheses that otherwise would be too nebulous to propose or defend. (To exaggerate a bit: now that I know my way around these methods, doing psycholinguistics with strictly verbal models sometimes feels like doing syntax without drawing trees!) I’m looking forward to continuing to use these methods to spell out and test theories at the interface between processing and general cognition.

What has been the most rewarding aspect of your academic career so far, particularly in terms of your research contributions?

I’ll need more time and experience to feel like I can identify what has been most rewarding! But something recent that’s been very satisfying has been the joy of working on the same question for long enough to prove myself wrong. (Of course, it turns out this doesn’t actually take all that long.)

In my dissertation, over a couple of experiments, I had tried and failed to find any sign of processing difficulty during reading associated with initially-appealing interpretations of discourse coherence that were ultimately incorrect (e.g. a passage “S1 S2” that initially could, but ultimately couldn’t, describe a causal sequence “S1 because S2”). I thought this might be a firm generalization, that such effects might never exist, and readers could always be somewhat conservative about pragmatic-level decisions of meaning.

But this year, I’ve been working with Daniel Altshuler and fellow recent UCSC alum Kelsey Sasaki, both at Oxford, to continue that search, and recently, we’ve found a few cases where we do observe evidence of processing difficulty, evidently because readers sometimes make rapid incremental analyses in this domain. This has raised all sorts of puzzles (what controls the variation between experiments? task effects? subtleties of stimuli?), and it’s clear that we’ll have much more to do before we can reach a new stable explanation, but there’s a lot of excitement in this re-theorizing, and in feeling the progress towards a more complete picture of things.

Wagers receives multicampus grant

Matt Wagers, Professor and Chair of Linguistics.

Professor Matt Wagers has been awarded $154,659 through the University of California’s prestigious Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) for his team’s project: Leveraging California’s Linguistic Diversity to Improve Large Language Models. The project will address how AI systems can better reflect California’s rich linguistic and neurocognitive diversity, and assess gaps in the accessibility of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, for users outside standard linguistic norms. Capitalizing on a growing network of psycholinguists and language scientists at six other UC campuses, one of the goals of this project is to understand how to create AI tools that are more inclusive and equitable for California’s diverse population. Congratulations, Matt!

Read more about this in the UCSC Newscenter.

Andrew Kato and Eli Sharf at Amsterdam Colloquium

Andrew Kato (left) and Eli Sharf (right)

At the Amsterdam Colloquium 2024 this past December, PhD student Eli Sharf and undergraduate student Andrew Kato presented their latest research. Eli delivered a presentation titled “What Appositives Can Tell Us About Names and Definite Descriptions”. Andrew presented “Relative Quantification and Equative Scope-Taking.”

In addition, several other UCSC linguists and alumni presented their latest research as well: Natasha Korotkova (Utrecht), in collaboration with Pranav Anand, discussed joint research in their talk titled “Facts, Intentions, Questions: English ‘Coming-to-Know’ Predicates in Deliberative Environments.” Jack Duff (PhD 2023), in collaboration with Daniel Altshuler, presented “Reanalysis in Discourse Comprehension: Evidence from Reading Times”. Hitomi Hirayama (PhD 2019) presented “A Pragma-Semantic Account for Negative Island Obviation by wa in Japanese”, and Tom Roberts (PhD 2021) delivered a talk titled “Just-Asking Questions”.

The proceedings are available here.

Andrew Kato featured in THI Undergrad Profile

Andrew, a linguistics major, was recently featured in the THI Undergraduate Profile.

Andrew Kato

Andrew participated in the inaugural Undergraduate Research Fellows in Linguistics and Language Science (URFLLS) program and has been working with Professor Pranav Anand, The Humanities Institute Faculty Director and Linguistics Professor, since Spring 2024.

Read more about the story on the THI website, or employing humanities news and stories site.

Aissen in NLLT

A new article by Professor Judith Aissen and coauthor Gilles Polian has appeared in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, entitled “Possessor extraction and categorical subject in Tseltalan”. The abstract follows:

The Tseltalan (Mayan) languages, Tsotsil and Tseltal, have two options for extracting the possessor in wh-questions. Wh-movement can either move the entire possessive phrase (‘pied piping’) or it can move the possessor alone, stranding the possessum. Each option is associated with restrictions related to the specificity of the possessum: stranding is possible only when the possessum is non-specific, pied-piping only when it is specific. We focus primarily on the former restriction. Earlier work on Tsotsil, and the related language, Ch’ol, analyzed the derivation with stranding as involving subextraction, i.e., extraction of an internal possessor. We argue that subextraction is not possible at all in Tseltalan and that therefore only an external possessor can be extracted without pied-piping. It is fairly clear that in transitive clauses, possessors of the internal argument are extracted as external possessors, not internal ones, as they extract only as applied objects in an applicative construction. We extend this analysis to unaccusative clauses, arguing that the possessor of the internal argument in an unaccusative clause, as well as to the possessor within certain prepositional phrases, extracts from an external position. We identify this position as Specifier of TP and propose that the phrase which occupies it is interpreted as the subject of a categorical judgment (Kuroda 1972, among others). This analysis accounts for specificity effects in possessor extraction and illuminates issues related to word order, predicative possession, experiential collocations, and the nature of ’topic’ positions in Mayan.

Linguistics students receive Koret Scholarships

Linguistics majors Katie Arnold and Elliot-Elyjah Mcwhinnie, along with Psychology major and Linguistics minor Audrey Yu, have been selected as 2025 Koret Scholars! This competitive scholarship, which comes with a $2,000 award, is awarded to up to 50 students each year for their exceptional research.

The WHASC Editors invited each of them to share a few words about their research projects:

Photo of Katie Arnold

Katie Arnold

I received the Koret Award for my senior thesis, which investigates the nonnative perception of Italian consonant length. Three participant groups with different Italian proficiencies—naïve, beginner, advanced—will be asked to discriminate between short and long consonants in /VCV/ and /VCCV/ Italian nonce and low-frequency words. The working hypotheses of my thesis are that (i) English speakers will be more sensitive to vowel length differences compared to consonant length differences; (ii) that English speakers will require more dramatic contrasts for accurate discrimination of consonant length while being able to detect more subtle vowel distinctions; and (iii), that language proficiency will have a positive effect on consonant length detection, with advanced listeners detecting short-long differences more accurately than their naïve and beginner counterparts.

Photo of Elliot-Elyjah Mcwhinnie

Elliot-Elyjah Mcwhinnie

As a Koret scholar, my research will focus on the nuances of African American Language (AAL) in California. Through my research, I seek to understand and discover the participation of AAL speakers in the California Vowel Shift.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  

Photo of Audrey Yu

Audrey Yu

My research project is entitled “Person or Condition First: Language Effects on Parent-Child Conversations About Traits.” When we speak to children, we often make topics simpler and give information in a way that allows them to be easily digested. We know that parent-child interaction heavily influences how children perceive the world around them (McHugh et al., 2024). However, we currently do not know how parents explain complex topics such as disability and mental illness. Prior work suggest the children think about disabilities in essentialist ways (i.e., due to something internal and unchangeable about the person), which has been linked to bias (Menendez & Gelman, 2024). In this project, I want to investigate how parents explain mental and physical traits (including mental illness and several disabilities) to their children and how this conversations influence how children think about these topics. To explore this, we will recruit 60 parent-child dyads with children 5 to 8 years of age. Each participant will receive a Qualtrics survey where they will be randomly assigned a series of vignettes that use person-first (e.g., “autistic person”) or condition-first language (e.g., “person with autism”). After each vignette, dyads will discuss three questions: Why do you think [character] is [trait]? Would [character]’s kids also be [trait] even if they were raised by someone else? What are some things that you think [character] can or cannot do because they are [trait]? I hypothesize that dyads will be less likely to use essentialist ideas when given stories that are person-first. This project will help elucidate our understanding of how children develop an understanding of disability.

Congratulations, Audrey, Elliot, and Katie!

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