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Summer Digest 2025

Welcome to our summer recap blowout spectacular! We’ve got a dissertation defense, major grants, fieldwork trips, a boatload of presentations and publications, a wedding, and much more. Read on for all the details of what the department has been up to since May.

If you have news to share, please submit your news for future issues of SCling Wrap, cause we need your help keeping up with what’s ✨fresh✨ at USC Linguistics.

Zhang defends dissertation 🎉

On August 29th, Yubin Zhang successfully defended his dissertation, Sentence Intonation: A Dynamical Gestural Approach, chaired by Louis Goldstein. Congratulations, Yubin!

Yubin celebrates with committee & compatriots post-defense:

N{SF,IH} grants 💸

A $320,000 NSF grant (Award #243849, LangDiv: The psycholinguistics of grammatical gender encoded on noun class prefixes) was awarded to PI Zuzanna Fuchs and co-Is Travis Major and Justine Mukhwana Sikuku (Moi University).

Fuchs, Major, and Sikuku at the World Congress of African Linguistics in Nairobi, August 2024:

The NIH NIDCD T-32 Training Grant Training in Hearing & Communications Neuroscience, which has supported numerous linguistics PhD students since July 2009, has been renewed through June 2030. The grant’s PI is Keck’s Christopher Shera, with Preceptors Louis Goldstein, Dani Byrd, Toby Mintz, Shri Narayanan, Jason Zevin, and others.

Fieldwork trips to Ghana and Tibet ✈️

A group led by Harold Torrence (UCLA) and Travis Major spent a month in Ghana doing fieldwork funded by NSF grant #2438901 The crosslinguistic components of clausal complementation, PI Torrence, co-PI Major. The group included six students, with USC’s PhD student JK Subramony and undergraduate Jack Schilson joining three UCLA students and one from Cape Coast in Ghana. The group worked with speakers in Amedzofe to investigate clausal complementation in Avatime, with students developing their own research projects in addition to the group’s main research focus.

The whole group at dinner:

The USC delegation:

With speakers in Amedzofe:

In what I’m sure must be an important aspect of the methodology of linguistic fieldwork, JK held various animals in his hands:

The department’s fieldwork activities weren’t limited to Africa this summer! PhD student Zhendong Liu spent four weeks in Lhasa working with three local Lhasa speakers to investigate main clause structure, nominalization, relativization, and scrambling.

Audrey Li: Academician 🎓

Professor Emerita Audrey Li has been appointed as a new Academician by Academia Sinica, Taiwan. This is the highest academic honor in Taiwan, and Li is the first female linguist to be recognized as a member of the academy.

Inked ✍️

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

You couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a USC linguist giving a presentation this summer.

  • Olesia Bokhanovich (Psychology) & Toby Mintz. “The Lexical Development of Underspecified Nouns ‘One’ and ‘Thing’ in Toddlers.” Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, MN, 5/1-3

  • Woojae Jeong, A. Kommineni, K. Avramidis,  Takfarinas Medani, C. McDaniel, Blank, I., Byrd D., R. Cahn, A. Habibi, S. Narayanan, R. M. Leahy, K. Lerman. “Decoding Depression and Suicidality Related Neural Features from EEG.” 3rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Epilepsy and Neurological Disorders. Breckenridge, CO, 3/3-6

  • Mary Katie Kennedy. “Evidence of Hierarchically-Complex Syntactic Structure Within BERT’s Word Representations.” Society for Computation in Linguistics, Eugene, OR, 7/18-20

  • Zhendong Liu. “The semantic composition of event counting expressions within nominals in Mandarin Chinese.” Semantics and Linguistic Theory, Cambridge, MA, 5/20-22

  • Helen Lu (UBC), Olesia Bokhanovich (Psychology) & Toby Mintz. “How Language Experience Shapes Sensitivity to Non-Adjacent Dependencies in 12-Month-Old Infants.” Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, MN, 5/1-3

Liu at SALT:

Lu, Bokhanovich, and Mintz at SRCD:

Zuzanna Fuchs‘s PoMMLab was robustly represented at the sixteenth Heritage Language Research Institute, which took place in Madison, Wisconsin from June 16th-19th. Fuchs gave an invited panel talk, and an additional 10 (!) lab members were (co-)authors on three posters:

  • Zuzanna Fuchs. “The role of noun transparency in the facilitative processing of grammatical gender in Heritage Spanish”

  • Zuzanna Fuchs, Emma Kealey, Esra Eldem-Tunç, Leo Memelstein, Linh Pham, Anna Runova, Seoyoon Hong, Metehan Oğuz, Yue Chen, Catherine Pan & JK Subramony. “Predicting facilitative processing of gender in Heritage Spanish using measures of lexical proficiency”

  • Esra Eldem-Tunç, Zuzanna Fuchs & Elsi Kaiser. “Addressing the Silent Problem: Heritage Speakers’ Interpretation of Anaphora under Verbal Ellipsis”

  • Anna Runova & Zuzanna Fuchs. “Perception and production of gender-marking vowels in heritage Russian”

Chen, Eldem-Tunç, Runova, Kealey & Fuchs at HLRI:

USC linguistics rolled deep at the 47th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, which took place in San Francisco 7/30-8/2, with five department members making five presentations:

  • Darby Grachek. “Connection Between Lexical Processing and Phonological Regularity: A Comparison Between English and Turkish”

  • Muxuan He & Elsi Kaiser. “Irrational Speaker or Wonky World: Modeling Prior Revision and Prior Update”

  • Muxuan He & Elsi Kaiser. “Communication form modulates sentence interpretation: (A)typicality inferences from descriptions vs. direct speech”

  • Haley Hsu & Elsi Kaiser. “Susceptibility to Semantic Illusions: Attentional Consequences of Other Errors”

  • Natsumi Taniguchi. “A Crosslinguistic Investigation on the Correlation between Functional Load of Tone and Tone-Melody Correspondence”

He, Grachek, Taniguchi, and Hsu in front of a backdrop that makes their location unmistakable:

USC around the world 🌏

Over the summer USC linguists presented their work on four different continents, in addition to the North American talks listed above:

  • Zuzanna Fuchs, Travis Major, Justine Sikuku & Catherine Pan. “New tools for preparing experimental work: a crowd-sourced lexical corpus of Lubukusu. 4th Language Association of Eastern African Conference, Dodoma, Tanzania, 8/13-15

  • Zuzanna Fuchs & Anna Runova. “Eye-tracking evidence for grammaticalized animacy agreement in Polish.” Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning Workshop, Zurich, Switzerland, 9/1-2

  • Po-Hsuan Huang & Stephanie Shih. “Informativity and cost allocation in tonal coarticulation in Taiwan Southern Min and Taiwan Mandarin.” The 3rd International Conference on Tone and Intonation, Herrsching, Germany, 5/16–18

  • Zhixian Huang. “Revisiting Non-canonical Objects in Mandarin.” The 27th Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar, Seoul, Korea, 8/14-16

  • Mary Katie Kennedy. “Evidence of Generative Syntax in LLMs.” The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vienna, Austria, 7/27-8/1

  • T. Medani, S.R. Kadiri, W. Jeong, A. Kommineni, K. Avramidis, C. McDaniel, M. Hughes, I. Blank, D. Byrd, E. Kaiser, K. Lerman, B. Cahn, A. Habibi, R.M. Leahy, S. Narayanan. “Multiodal neural and biobehavioral integration for predicting preconscious responses in mental health risk assessment.” Workshop on Mapping Brain-Body-Behavior Signal Dynamics in Human Speech Production and Interaction, a Satellite Workshop of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Hyderabad, India, 4/6

  • Metehan Oğuz, Yavuz F. Bakman & Duygunur Yaldiz. “Un-considering Contextual Information: Assessing LLMs’ Understanding of Indexical Elements.” The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vienna, Austria, 7/27-8/1

  • Deniz Rudin. “Unconventionalizing Common Ground.” International Pragmatics Association, Brisbane, Australia, 6/22-27

Kennedy in front of a backdrop that makes her location unmistakable:

A flotilla of USC linguists presented posters at AMLaP, which took place in Prague, Czechia from September 4th-6th:

  • Zuzanna Fuchs & Anna Runova. “A grammatical animacy agreement feature: evidence from processing in Polish

  • Hailin Hao & Zuzanna Fuchs. “Effects of Surprisal and Contextual Entropy on L2 and Heritage Language Processing”

  • Linh Pham, Zuzanna Fuchs & Elsi Kaiser. “Dynamic language transfer in bilingualism: How L1 Vietnamese L2 English speakers process filler-gap dependencies in English”

  • Anna Runova & Zuzanna Fuchs. “Perception and production of gender-marking vowels in heritage Russian”

Alum Jun Lyu (Peking University) reunites with Zuzanna Fuchs and Hailin Hao at AMLaP:

Back to school dinner dates 🍽️

USiL’s welcome-back Homecome-Ling event was held on September 4th from 6:30-7:30pm. Pizza was eaten; bingo was played; the conference room was filled to bursting with undergraduates, PhD students, and professors:

The department’s Research Orientation Dinner was held on September 15th from 5-7pm. Italian food was eaten; research interests and projects were described; but for some reason the only pictures that were taken were of dogs, not of humans.

Summer congregations 💍

On July 12th, Emma Kealey married her husband Jake at the Cooper Chapel in Bella Vista, AR. Mazel tov!

Emma wasn’t the only linguist observed congregating outside of California against a backdrop of greenery this summer! Andrew Simpson and his wife Zoe met up with alums Ulli Steindl and Thomas Borer during a hiking trip in the Romansh part of Switzerland.

Upcoming Events

Department Events

  • Monday, April 22 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: Darby Grachek

  • Tuesday, April 23 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: Emma Kealey, “Investigatingthe strength of spreading activation from grammatical gender”

  • Wednesday, April 24 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: Nelly Marutyan

  • Friday, April 26 at 11am @ MeaningLab: Yasha Sapir, “How to build a pyramid with vague propositions”

USiL Events

Undergraduate Students in Linguistics is holding Weekly General Meetings on Wednesdays from 6-8pm in GFS 330. All interested undergraduates are encouraged to attend—no prerequisites necessary. Next week’s meeting will discuss Study-Ling Abroad (study abroad opportunities and experiences); this week’s meeting focused on Memeling (the linguistics of memes). If you’re interested in experiencing FOMO, here’s what you missed by not going to the USiL meeting this week:

The Recursion Reading Group is returning this semester. The group meets on Thursdays from 8:30-9:30pm to read Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach.

 
 
 

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