Weekly Digest, 4/14/2025

Welcome to the antepenultimate week of classes, everyone! In this late-breaking issue of SCLing Wrap, you’ll find reports on exciting adventures inside and outside the classroom, as well as flyers for some interesting upcoming events 👀🤔💯💯💯✨.

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.

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

• Graduate student Metehan Oğuz gave an invited talk at UC Santa Cruz S-Circle titled “Indexical Shift and its interactions with Perspective Sensitive Items (PSIs): Indexical PSIs in Turkish”.

• USC Linguistics was well-represeted at the first-since-2019 Southern California Meeting on Phonology (SCAMP), held at UCSD. Presentations were as follows:

  • Graduate student Natsumi Taniguchi gave a poster titled “An information theoretic approach to tone-melody correspondence”

  • Graduate student Jack Goldberg gave a poster titled “Probing the limits of Bashkir loanword vowel harmony”

  • Graduate student Po-Hsuan Huang gave a poster titled “What’s in a name?Phonetic and phonological conditioning of personal names in Taiwan Mandarin”

  • Gradueate student Darby Grachek gave a talk titled “Lexical decomposition variables predict phonological exceptionality: Evidence from English and Turkish”

  • Alum Reed Blaylock, now a postdoc at Chapman University, gave a poster titled “Toward a unified articulatory account of speech and sign transitions”, joint work with Dr. Zed Sehyr (Chapman U.).

Below are some photos of the crew (minus Reed, unfortunately!), with faculty member Canaan Breiss, who tagged along.

Other good news 🎉

Members of USiL went out hiking with faculty member Andrew Simpson to Griffith Park, followed by lunch in Thai Town – photographic proof below!

Upcoming Events

Invited speaker: Dr. Nicole Holliday (UC Berkeley)

Undergraduate Students in Linguistics (USiL), with the co-sponsorship of Shift SC, Anthropology & Global Studies Club, presents a talk by Dr. Nicole Holliday (UC Berkeley Linguistics). All are invited to attend! Details as follows:

Where: Taper Hall Room 101 When: Monday, April 21st 6:30PM-8:30PM Link to register: https://tinyurl.com/smalltalks2025

Title: Sociolinguistic Competence Versus Artificial “Intelligence”: Variation in the Face of Ubiquitous Large Language Models

Abstract: Linguists take it as axiomatic that speakers are experts on their languages, both in grammar and usage. However, as Large Language Models (LLM) trained on text and speech become ubiquitous in domains from daily tasks to education and employment, human expertise about language is increasingly devalued. This talk will present the results of a study that focuses on how LLMs judge and purport to “fix” the speech of human talkers, also known as Socially Prescriptive Speech Technologies (SPSTs). The study shows how two commercial systems,  Read.AI and the Zoom Revenue Accelerator (ZRA) act to reinforce narrow “standard” language ideologies and fail to provide actionable, realistic feedback to users about their speech style. These systems also provide systematically worse evaluations for black speakers, as well as those who are neurodivergent. Results show that “AI”-based SPST programs that purport to evaluate human speech do so without consideration of linguistic principles or acknowledgement of speakers’ sociolinguistic competencies. Such systems also act without transparency for both designers and users by design, reproducing social stereotypes inherent to their training data. As a result, they advise humans to produce unnatural speech, and they punish speakers who do not conform to the narrow targets established by an LLM’s training data. As such technologies are already being used to make employment decisions, provide speech therapy, and even draft police reports, the fact that these systems systematically misevaluate speech represents a significant threat to all human speakers, most especially those from marginalized groups.

Department Events

• Monday, April 14 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: No meeting

• Tuesday, April 15 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: Hailin Hao, “Syntactic Reduction and Uniform Information Density: Revisiting that-mentioning in English Complement Clauses”

• Wednesday, April 16 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: Katie Kennedy, Title TBA

• Friday, April 18 at 2pm @ MeaningLab: JK Subramony, Title TBA

USiL Events

• Recursion Reading Group – Thursdays from 8pm-9pm in the GFS Conference Room. Next up: Chapter 7 of Gödel, Escher, Bach!

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