Weekly Digest, 10/3/25

goldenstateservicesj
Oct 3
4 min read

This week we’ve got reports on two flagship conferences that took place over the same weekend, plus info about an upcoming campus tour, undergraduate research in the department, and more!

Please do your part to keep SCLing Wrap chunky! If you have updates 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.

Upcoming Campus Tour 🗺️

USiL Community Lead (and official USC Admissions Center tour guide) Feliz Gilpin-Moreno will be giving a linguistics-flavored campus tour sometime during the week of October 14th (TBD, with your input requested). All are welcome: undergrads, grads, and faculty. If you’re interested in the tour, please indicate your availability at this link.

Undergraduate Researcher Spotlight 🔍

Julian Patino is a Junior Industrial & Systems Engineering major working toward a Progressive MS degree in Analytics. On top of all that, Julian does double duty in the linguistics department, doing research in Zuzanna Fuchs’sPoMMLab and working five days a week in the department front office.

Q: Tell us about your experience as a student worker in the linguistics department front office.

A: Working in the department office has really opened me up to more personal connections with everyone in the linguistics department. From PhD students to professors, I love catching up on my day with others. Although I do come from a different background, we all have the same goal in mind—higher education.

Q: Tell us about your research project: its topic, its methods, and your responsibilities on the project.

A: The POMM lab studies the psycholinguistics of monolingualism and multilingualism, with a particular focus on heritage speakers. Our research examines how bilingual speakers process grammatical features like number and gender agreement, particularly in English-dominant heritage speakers of Spanish. The lab uses visual-world eye-tracking methodology to investigate how monolingual and heritage speakers process language in real time. Last semester, I worked primarily on the data collection end, conducting 4-5 participant studies on our SPAMB study (Spanish Ambiguity). This semester I will work as an co-author to our new project ALGUN, where we study how Spanish native and heritage speakers predict gender agreement on algún ‘some’ when gender markers are visible versus hidden.

Q: What have you found most surprising about your experience doing research? Challenging? Rewarding?

A: In respect to research, what’s always challenging is that first step. Coming from an engineering background, my mindset is structured to operate differently than a linguist’s. That first step will always be the most difficult, whether it’s ideating or understanding. However, the reward follows after that first step, where I really dive into the subject matter and process (like study design, data collection, etc). Seeing our questions become studyable and seeing those interactive studies come to life gives me passion for uncovering more questions not only in the linguistic field but also to my own language identity as a heritage speaker of Spanish.

Q: What do you get up to outside of the linguistics department?

A: Outside of linguistics and engineering, I have a very deep passion for weightlifting, specifically powerlifting. The sport is basically maxing out on your squat, bench, and deadlift, and varies depending on how much body weight you weigh. Here at USC, I serve as the team captain of Trojan Barbell Club, where we compete at a collegiate level against other California schools as well as coaching members to national championships. My next meet is at the end of October, where I hope to get a score of 400+, or in other words, within the top 1% of strength globally.

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

USC at AMP 🔊

The 2025 edition of the Annual Meeting on Phonology, a flagship conference of the field, took place in Berkeley 9/25-27, and USC phonology was robustly represented.

Canaan Breiss & Jon Gauthier. “Do speech models use phonological features?” (special session on Deep Phonology)
Canaan Breiss, Jon Gauthier, Matthew Leonard & Edward F. Chang. “Emergent morpho-phonological structure in self-supervised speech models” (special session on Deep Phonology)
Canaan Breiss & Anna Runova. “What have we learned about naturalness in vowel patterns from 20 years of AGL experiments? A Bayesian meta-analysis”
Natsumi Taniguchi. “A cross-linguistic investigation on the correlation between functional load of tone and tone-melody correspondence”

In addition to the presentations listed above, Stephanie Shih made a special appearance to surprise Sharon Inkelas with a festschrift titled Phonology at its Interfaces, which Shih/she co-edited with Hannah Sande, Larry Hyman, Darya Kavitskaya, Anne Pycha and Alan Yu.

USC at SuB

The 30th anniversary edition of Sinn und Bedeutung, a flagship conference in semantics, took place in Frankfurt 9/23-27, and USC semantics was robustly represented.

Muxuan He, Deniz Rudin & Elsi Kaiser. “Revisiting the context-update potential of negation at the level of speaker rationality” (special session on philosophical and linguistic approaches to negation)
Yingyu Su. “Compositional rhetoricality: the case of Cantonese sentence-final particles me1 and me↓.”
Ariela Ye & Yaqing Hu. “When evidentiality meets deonticity: a case study of Nuosu Yi di^31/44 and zo⁴⁴“

Upcoming Events

Department Events

Monday, October 6 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: Haley Hsu
Tuesday, October 7 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: Po-Hsuan Huang, “Speaker-oriented versus listener-oriented production: The case of classifier specificity in Taiwan Mandarin and Chinese Mandarin”
Wednesday, October 8 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: Metehan Oğuz

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. If one evening meeting a week leaves you craving more, never fear: the Recursion Reading Group meets on Thursdays from 8:30-9:30pm to read Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach.