Weekly Digest, 8/26/2024

Welcome back from summer, folks, and to the 2024-25 academic year! We hope your summer has been enjoyable and restful. This inaugural issue of SCLing Wrap is packed full of updates about what department members have been up to over the break.

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.

Congratulations! 👏

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

The IEEE Board of Directors has selected Shri Narayanan to receive the 2025 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, for an outstanding contribution to the advancement of speech and/or audio signal processing. The award comes with the following citation: “For contributions to speech communication science and technologies for inclusive human-centered engineering.”

Congratulations to Mary Byram Washburn, who has been selected for the General Education Teaching Award for her contributions to the GE program in 2022-2023.

Congratulations to Katie Kennedy, who has been selected for a General Education Graduate Assistant Award for her contributions to the GE program in 2022-2023.

Congratulations to Gabriel Griswold, who has been awarded the Order of Troy, one of USC’s highest honors for undergraduates.  Gabriel was also selected as a winner of the Global ScholarPrize, with a $10,000 award for graduate school, and received a USC Global Scholar Distinction, Renaissance Scholar Distinction, and Discovery Scholar Distinction.

First USC, then the world! 🚀

See where Trojans are going next:

Reed Blaylock (PhD 2022, Dornsife Fellow in General Education 2022-24) has accepted a post-doc position at Chapman University in Irvine, California on a grant investigating articulatory coordination in ASL. Congratulations Reed!

Yijing Lu successfully defended her dissertation, “The Dynamical Foundation of Articulation in Stuttered Speech” on August 8, and has accepted a post-doc position in linguistics at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Congratulations Yijing!

Steven Foley (teaching postdoc in syntax 2023-24) has accepted a Visiting Assistant Professor position at the University of Georgia, Athens. Congratulations Steven!

Please congratulate Mairym Llorens Monteserín (PhD 2022), who has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Neurolinguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez.

Congratulations to Jina Song (PhD 2023), who will be starting a new position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature at Hongik University in Seoul.

Inked ✍️

USC Linguists spilled lots of ink over the break:

• Canaan Breiss, Alexis Ross, Amani Maina-Kilaas, Roger Levy, and Jacob Andreas. 2024. “Learning phonotactics from linguistic informants.” Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics. Link to paper.

• Zuzanna Fuchs and Wenqi Zeng. 2024. “Facilitative use of grammatical gender in Heritage speakers with two gender systems”. Heritage Language Journal.Link to paper.

• Darby Grachek and Elsi Kaiser “Phonological learning is asymmetrical between prefixes and suffixes.” Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America. Link to paper.

• Hailin Hao, Muxuan He and Zuzanna Fuchs. 2024. “Greta is a female director: When gender stereotypes interact with informativity expectations.” Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Link to paper.

• Haley Hsu and Elsi Kaiser. 2024. “The fact that these are opinions: Processing and acceptability patterns of subjective vs. objective information embedded under the fact that.” Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America. Link to paper.

• Yaqing Hu and Andrew Simpson. Online first. “Specificity contrasts in Lalo Yi: structure and interpretation.” Studies in Language. Link to paper.

• Luis Miguel Toquero-Pérez. 2024. “Superlatives, partitives and apparent φ-feature mismatch in Spanish.” RLLT 21, Special Issue of Isogloss: Open Journal of Romance Linguistics.Link to paper.

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

USC Linguistics was well-represented at conferences this summer:

• Canaan Breiss, Hironori Katsuda, and Shigeto Kawahara presented a poster titled “Frequency-conditioned variation constrained by the grammar in Japanese nasalization” at the 2024 Conference on Laboratory Phonology in Seoul, South Korea. Link to abstract. At the same conference, Adam Albright and Canaan Breiss presented a poster titled “A Poisson model of phonological cooccurrence restrictions”. Link to abstract.

• Jessica Campbell, Louis Goldstein, and Leonardo Lancia gave a talk titled “Phase-locking of articulation and spectral flow” at the International Seminar on Speech Production in Autrans, France. At the same conference, Jessica Campbell, Louis Goldstein, and Khalil Iskarous gave a poster titled “LSTM analysis of time scales of breakdown in ALS.” Link to program.

• Cui Ding, Metehan Oguz, Zuzanna Fuchs, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox, Olga Parshina, and Maria Polinsky gave a talk titled “Processing of agreement vs. concord: evidence from Russian mouse-tracking at PsychoSlav 2024in Wrocław, Poland. At the same conference, Zuzanna Fuchs gave a poster titled “Independent processing of gender and animacy agreement features in Polish.”

• Cui Ding, Metehan Oguz, Ethan Wilcox, and Zuzanna Fuchs gave a poster titled “How does dependency type mediate gender agreement in Russian?” at the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

• Steven Foley presented a talk titled “Processing Philippine and Reverse Philippine alignment” at the 31st Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 2024) in Amherst, Massachusetts. They also presented a poster with Byron Ahn and Lauren Ackerman titled “Number, animacy, and individual variation in the processing of cataphora.” at the 37th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP 2024) in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

• Hailin Hao gave a lot of presentations: work with Himanshu Yadav and Elsi Kaiser titled “Naturalistic reading time support information locality” was presented at CogSci 2024; at HSP 2024; and at the 7th meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL 2024) in Irvine, California. He also presented work with Yang Yang and Michael Hahn titled “Information locality in the processing of classifier-noun dependences in Mandarin Chinese” at CogSci 2024, and HSP 2024. He also presented a poster with Muxuan He and Zuzanna Fuchs titled “Greta Is a Female Director: When Gender Stereotypes Interact with Informativity Expectations” at CogSci 2024.

• Muxuan He, Hailin Hao, and Zuzanna Fuchs presented a poster called “Are Informativity-Based Linguistic Predictions Driven by Gender-Stereotypical Knowledge?” at HSP 2024.

• Elsi Kaiser gave a talk titled “Morphology and scale structure: On -ish in Finnish” at Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 34, in Rochester (NY). Link to program. She also gave a talk titled “Are we competing? A crosslinguistic, psycholinguistic look at pronominal inventories” at a workshop on the theme of “Pronominal competition in grammar and processing” held in conjunction with the CreteLing summer school in Rethymnon, on Crete, Greece.

• Alexis Wellwood, Douglas Wadle, and Devansh Bansal gave a presentation titled “Temporal shaping and the event/process distinction” at CogSci 2024. Alexis also gave a talk titled“Semantics at the language-mind interface” at the Workshop on Language and Thought at the third annual conference on Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM 3). Link to program.

• Zuzanna Fuchs, Travis Major, and Justine Sikuku gave a talk titled “Investigating properties of mental representation in noun similarity judgements in Lubukusu” at at the 55th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 2024) in Montreal, Canada; the same team gave a talk titled “Exploring speaker mental representations of noun classes: a Lubukusu case study” at the 11th World Congress of African Linguistics (WOCAL 2024) in Nairobi, Kenya.

USC Linguists also gave a number of invited talks:

• Canaan Breiss gave an invited colloquium in the Linguistics Department at the University of Pennsylvania titled “Token frequency in the grammar: evidence from Japanese voiced velar nasalization.”

• Zuzanna Fuchs was an invited speaker at the Linguistics Symposium at California State University, Fullerton, where she gave a talk titled “Heritage speakers: language processing, noun categorization, and the mental lexicon”. She also gave a talk titled “The processing of number and gender features in Heritage Spanish: Insights from eye-tracking” at the 15th Heritage Language Research Institute, and an invited colloquium at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA titled “Number and gender agreement during real-time language comprehension in Heritage Spanish”. Finally, she was also a participant in a panel titled “Experimental work and fieldwork on understudied and heritage languages” at Mayfest at the University of Maryland.

• Zuzanna Fuchs and Travis Major also presented jointly a talk titled “Editorial requirements and manuscript preparation” at the second Writing Workshop at Moi University, Kenya, whose theme was “Sharpening the lens: enhancing linguistics career prospects in east Africa”.

• Hailin Hao gave invited talks titled “Information Locality in Sentence Processing” at the Sentence Processing Colloquium at the University of Potsdam, and at the Language, Cognition, and Computation Lab at Saarland University.

New faces 👋

The new academic year brings new members of the USC Linguistics community; below, they introduce themselves in their own words. Say hello and introduce yourself if you see them around the department!

First, we’re welcoming a new postdoc and teaching fellow in syntax!

• Your name (what you’d like to go by when encountered around the department): Carolina Fraga

• Your pronouns: she/her

• Your home town: Buenos Aires, Argentina

• Where you’ve studied: at the The Graduate Center, The City University of New York

• What your interests are in linguistics? I’m interested in syntax and morphology, in particular in the study of English and Spanish dialects.

• What do you do for fun? I like to bake, have a movie night at home, and go for long walks. 

• A fun fact: I have a passion for famous quotes!

Next, we’re welcoming five new first-year PhD students!

Yue Chen

• Your name (what you’d like to go by when encountered around the department): Yue Chen

• Your pronouns: she/her

• Your home town: Yixing, China

• Where you’ve studied: UCLA

• What your interests are in linguistics? Psycholinguistics and language acquisition.

• What do you do for fun? Literature, jogging, and baking cookies. 

• A fun fact: I am a heritage speaker of Wu Chinese and I spoke only Wu Chinese until the age of 5, after which I learned Mandarin.

Po-Hsuan Huang

• Your name (what you’d like to go by when encountered around the department): Po-Hsuan

• Your pronouns: he/him

• Your home town: Changhua, Taiwan

• Where you’ve studied: Linguistics (National Taiwan University), English & French (National Chengchi University)

• What your interests are in linguistics? Phonology; phonetics; computational linguistics.

• What do you do for fun? I enjoy baking and cooking very much!

• A fun fact: I am one of the 18% population who can move their ears simultaneously.

Emma Kealey

• Your name (what you’d like to go by when encountered around the department): Emma

• Your pronouns: she/her/hers

• Your home town: Iowa City, Iowa

• Where you’ve studied: The University of Iowa

• What your interests are in linguistics? Psycholinguistics and language acquisition.

• What do you do for fun? Board games, reading, walking with my two dogs, trying new recipes.

• A fun fact: I’m 0 for 3 in keeping fiddle leaf figs alive, but I still have hope that #4 will work out.

Jayakrishnan Subramony

• Name and pronouns: Jayakrishnan (he/him).

• Narrative introduction: In all seriousness, I’m JK, and that’s what almost everyone who knows me calls me. I am from Kochi, a city in Kerala, in the southwest region of India, known for its beaches, rains and the abundance of coconut palms. After high school, I moved to Thiruvananthapuram, also in Kerala, for my integrated master’s degree at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, where I majored in physics. I then decided it was time for a major switch (pun intended), and went on to pursue a master’s degree in Computational Linguistics at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Language processing, morphosyntax, and psycholinguistics are my primary interests in linguistics—pronominal coreference and tense-aspect processing are what I aim to look further into. In addition to linguistics, I (claim to) read a lot; anything Middle Earth and Tolkien, I can speak non-stop about. I also cook a little, crochet (ask me about the sweater I crocheted), watch movies, and listen to music while doing anything non-academic. 

• Fun fact: Did you know that the idea of the embodiment of evil in Lord of the Rings, Sauron, started off as a cat called Tevildo?

Meilinda Sun

• Your name (what you’d like to go by when encountered around the department): Meilinda Sun

• Your pronouns: she/her

• Your home town: Cupertino, CA

• Where you’ve studied: Stanford University – BS in Computer Science

• What your interests are in linguistics? Computational linguistics.

• What do you do for fun? Watching soccer, learning languages, trying cafes and restaurants.

• A fun fact: I have perfect pitch!

In the community 👥

• Elsi Kaiser co-taught a course with Brian Dillon called “Experimental Syntax and Semantics: The view from Pronouns and Anaphora” at the CreteLing2024 summer school, held in Rethymnon, Greece.

• Jessica Campbell says: “In June and July, I worked as a summer intern at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders (NIDCD) at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland. As a member of Dr. Nadia Biassou’s lab, I consulted on a linguistic study related to computational modeling of language processing.”

Other good news 🎉

Su got married to her fiancé Ryan! Congratulations to Mrs. and Mr. Hanson!!!

Andrew spent two wonderful weeks hiking in the French Alps!

Canaan spent time in Japan and Korea, doing lots of hiking and sight-seeing before LabPhon!

Zuzanna and Travis spent time enjoying local Kenyan culture, particularly the cuisine! Above, they are pictured enjoying a meal of nyama choma (grilled meat), with their co-author Justine Sikuku and his family.

Upcoming Events

Department Events

• Monday, September 9 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: Organizational meeting

• Tuesday, August 27 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: Practice talks for AMLAP and X-PPL

• Wednesday, August 28 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: Organizational meeting

• Wednesday, September 4 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.