Banana Slugs at Tromsø Workshop on Phonological Domains

From right to left: Junko Ito, Nick Kalivoda, Martin Krämer, Peter Svenonius, Maya Wax Cavarello, Armin Mester

On March 13–14, a group of Santa Cruz linguists participated in the workshop Exploring Boundaries: Phonological Domains in the Languages of the World, held at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø—the northernmost university in the world.

Professor Junko Ito and Professor Armin Mester gave a talk entitled “Prosodic Windows as Tonal Domains: The Case of Kagoshima Japanese”.

Current PhD student Maya Wax Cavallaro presented her work titled “Evidence for the Syllable in Domain Generalization”.

Junko, Armin, and Maya also reconnected with Martin Krämer (UCSC LRC Research Associate, 2015), now Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT and a co-organizer of the workshop; Nick Kalivoda (PhD 2018), who presented on “Linear and Structural (A)symmetries in Syntax-Prosody Mapping”; and Peter Svenonius (PhD 1994), now Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT, who presented on “Words, Phrases, and the ‘Accentual Complex’ in Iron Ossetic” (joint work with Patrik Bye). 



Linguistics Students Recognized as 2024-2025 THI Undergraduate Research Fellows

The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz has announced its 2024-2025 Undergraduate Research Fellows, with 40% of the fellowship awarded to Linguistics students. Among them, Linguistics major Elliot-Elyjah McWhinnie received the Bertha N. Melkonian Prize for submitting the top research proposal. 

Congratulations to the following Linguistics students on their outstanding projects:

  • Katherine Arnold, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics & Multilingualism
    “Nonnative Perception of Italian Consonant Length Contrast”
  • Sam Beatty, Linguistics
    “Gendered voices and Transgender bodies: Where are we? What are we doing? And who are we talking to?”
  • Joshua Lieberstein, Linguistics
    “Verbless Clauses in Mayan K’iche’: A non-copular approach”
  • Elliot-Elyjah Mcwhinnie, Linguistics
    “Zooming in on the regional differences of African American Language in California”

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.

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