Weekly Digest, 11/11/2024

Welcome to the first SCLing Wrap of November, everyone! Hope you all are enjoying the long weekend; read on for updates from around the department over the last two weeks!

Remember, 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.

Inked ✍️

• Jinyoung Jo, Megha Sundara, and Canaan Breiss. 2024. “Predicting language outcomes at 3 years using individual differences in morphological segmentation in infancy.” Infant Behavior and Development. Link to paper.

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

• USC Linguistics had a strong showing at this year’s Annual Meeting on Phonology, held Nov. 1-3 at Rutgers University, NJ.

  • Fourth-year graduate student Darby Grachek presented a poster titled “A link between phonology and the lexicon: Morphophonological exceptionality and decomposition in English stress shift”

  • Second-year graduate student Jack Goldberg presented a poster titled “Target Based Analysis of Syllable Contact Sonority in Bashkir”

  • Faculty member Canaan Breiss presented a poster titled “Correlated idiosyncrasy in the English comparative and superlative alternations”.

• Canaan Breiss also gave two invited talks this past weekend, one at UMass Amherst, and one at UPenn.

Pets of USC Linguistics 🐕

This week’s animal friend is RoRo! See below for a message from RoRo, and a photo update of the elusive super-spiky-super-spy ChoCho, previously featured on Pets of USC Linguistics!

Su, RoRo’s mom, conveys a message from RoRo:

Hi everyone! My name is RoRo, it means “baby fat” in Chinese. My grandma said I need a bigger name to make up for my tiny size, so my full name is RoRo Teddy Bear Jefferson Su Hanson. I am a Yorkie Poodle mix, so my parents call me Porkie sometimes! My parents adopted me on September 9, 2024 when I was only 7 weeks old. I am currently 3 lbs and I will be about 10 lbs when I grow up! Even though I am still a baby, I already know how to play fetch, and not to pee pee or poo poo inside the house. I am super energetic, but I will calm down to snuggle with you if you grab me. I am not fully vaccinated yet so I can only stay at home for now, but I can’t wait to meet everyone when I am fully vaccinated in November! You can keep up with me @roroporkie on Instagram cuz of course my parents already made an account for me!

I am super snuggly, even with my pointy big brother ChoCho!

In the community👥

Faculty and grad students from USC Linguistics participated in the Center for Computational Language Sciences‘ fall retreat last week, held at Yaldaz Corner in Angeles National Forest. A good time (and excellent Persian food!) was had by all!

Upcoming Events

Department Events

• Monday, November 11 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: No meeting (Veteran’s Day)

• Tuesday, November 12 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: Linh Pham, “Effects of island constraints in second language processing”

• Wednesday, November 13 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: Yaqing Hu, Title TBA

• Wednesday, November 13 at 4:30pm @ MeaningLab: linguistics x philosophy x psychology reading group

USiL Events

Please check out https://www.usilusc.org/ for the latest on Undergraduate Students in Linguistics (USiL) events this semester.