Weekly Digest, 11/18/2024

Happy mid-November, everyone! As we near the end of the quarter, we have lots of news from around the department.

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 ✍️

• Travis Major and Harold Torrence. 2024. “Escape from Noun Complement Clauses in Avatime”. Languages, 9(11), 339 ; Special Issue: Escaping African Islands. Link to paper.

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

• Faculty member Travis Major gave an invited colloquium at Georgetown University called “Dissecting speech reports and tracking down sources”.

USC was well-represented by faculty and students at the 7th California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP[7]), held at UCSD this past weekend!

• Anna Runova and Canaan Breiss presented a talk titled “A  meta-analysis of learning bias in phonology: preliminary results on vowel harmony”

• Elsi Kaiser presented joint work with Haley Hsu in a talk titled “Fallibility in linguistic processing: On the interplay of attention and semantic representations”

• Esra Eldem presented joint work with Zuzanna Fuchs and Elsi Kaiser in a talk titled “Interpretation of anaphors under verbal ellipsis in heritage Turkish”

• Metehan Oğuz presented a talk titled “Effects of syntactic locality and semantic roles: Insights from Turkish reflexives”, joint work with Elsi Kaiser

• Yue Chen presented work with co-authors Ziyin Mai and Yige Chen (both of The Chinese University of Hong Kong) in a poster titled “Employing machine learning and language models to differentiate language patterns in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorder.”

• Yue Chen and Yingyu Su presented a poster titled “Exploring reflexive pronoun development and usage in Mandarin-Learning toddlers: A Comparative study of ASD and TD groups”

• JK Subramony presented a poster titled “Processing of null and overt pronominals in Malayalam”

Here are some photos of the weekend, including some real camp-ing! A group photo will accompany next SCLing Wrap issue.

Pets of USC Linguistics 🐈

This week’s featured animal friend is Tito!

Elise Griffiths, a Linguistics Work-Study student working on the front office, who is also Tito’s mom, says:

Tito is a fun and entertaining cat whose favorite activity is looking out the window at nearby birds and squirrels. He’s hilariously mischievous and doesn’t love affection as much as I do, but he’s the light of my life in kitty form ✨

Upcoming Events

The Center for Computational Language Sciences speaker series presents: Laura Gwilliams (Stanford)

Speaker: Laura Gwilliams, Stanford University Date: Nov 20, 2024 at 2pm (lunch provided at 1pm to talk attendees only) Location: Cammilleri Hall, Brain and Creativity Institute Register:tinyurl.com/cclsevent

Title: Computational architecture of speech comprehension

Abstract: Humans understand speech with such speed and accuracy, it belies the complexity of transforming sound into meaning. The goal of my research is to develop a theoretically grounded, biologically constrained and computationally explicit account of how the human brain achieves this feat. In my talk, I will present a series of studies that examine neural responses at different spatial scales: From population ensembles using magnetoencephalography and electrocorticography, to the encoding of speech properties in individual neurons across the cortical depth using Neuropixels probes in humans. The results provide insight into (i) what auditory and linguistic representations serve to bridge between sound and meaning; (ii) what operations reconcile auditory input speed with neural processing time; (iii) how information at different timescales is nested, in time and in space, to allow information exchange across hierarchical structures. My work showcases the utility of combining cognitive science, machine-learning and neuroscience for developing neurally-constrained computational models of spoken language understanding.

Bio: Laura Gwilliams received her BA in Linguistics from Cardiff University (UK) and a Master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience of Language from the BCBL (Basque Country, Spain). Laura then joined NYU, first as a research assistant, and then as a PhD student, working with David Poeppel, Alec Marantz and Liina Pylkkanen. There she used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to study the neural computations underlying dynamic speech understanding. Laura’s dissertation `Towards a mechanistic account of speech comprehension’ aims to combine insight from theoretical linguistics, neuroscience and machine-learning, and has received recognition from Meta, the William Orr Dingwall Foundation, the Martin Braine Fellowship, the Society for Neuroscience, and the Society for the Neurobiology of Language. As a post-doctoral scholar with Eddie Chang, Laura added intracranial EEG and single-unit recordings to her repertoire of techniques. She used her time in the Chang Lab to understand how laminar single neuronal spiking encodes speech properties in humans. Now as the director of the Gwilliams Laboratory of Speech Neuroscience (the GLySN Lab) at Stanford University, her group aims to understand the neural representations and computations that give rise to successful speech comprehension, using a range of recording methodologies, and analytical techniques.

Department Events

• Monday, November 18 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: Natsumi Taniguchi, title TBA

• Tuesday, November 19 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: Anna Runova, “Perception and production of gender-marking vowels in heritage Russian”

• Wednesday, November 20 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: Fulang Chen (MIT), title TBA

• Wednesday, November 20 at 2pm @ CCLS Speaker Series: Laura Gwilliams, “Computational architecture of speech comprehension”

• Wednesday, November 20 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.