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Weekly Digest, 9/26/25

After our monster summer digest last week, it’s time to celebrate the return of SCLing Wraps containing a reasonable amount of information. This week we’ve got the first in a series of profiles of undergraduate researchers, a summer school, six publications, five presentations, and good news from an alumna of our undergraduate program.

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.

Undergraduate Researcher Spotlight 🔍

Landi Jiang is a junior Cognitive Science & Computational Linguistics major currently working in Alexis Wellwood’s Meaning Lab.

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

A: In the Meaning Lab, we take theories from formal semantics and see if they’re supported by real-world human behavior. My project examines the possibility of event semantics for nouns like furniture, which are syntactically mass nouns, but appear to be semantically individuated. I’ve been working on the project for about a year, and I’ve made the stimuli, coded the experiments, and collected data from online participants. Currently, I’m trying my best to learn stats. Every day I get to make pictures of tiny chairs and think about how language interfaces with cognitive categorization, so it’s a pretty good gig!

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

A: I was surprised by how many seemingly unrelated skills were very helpful for research. I took a 3D modeling class for fun my freshman year, and that turned out to be pretty useful for making customized stimuli (a lot easier than finding perfect clip arts!). I was also working on a pattern-learning project in Dr. Mintz’s lab, and I was responsible for making a bunch of animated human action clips. I needed to pick motions that were distinct and natural, so I ended up using my old wrestling warm-ups. Somewhere on the lab drive is a folder of source videos where I’m doing speed skaters and tuck jumps, I had a lot of fun for sure.

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

A: I really enjoy going sketching and people-watching around the city. LA Historic Park is a good spot, I also like the roof of California Market in K-town. The bench in front of Tailwaggers in Larchmont is great if you want to look at fancy dogs. 

Summer School 🏫

The LSA summer institute took place from 7/7-8/5 in Eugene, OR. Canaan Breiss taught a class titled “Phonology and the lexicon”, and co-hosted a two-day workshop on Abstract and Item-Specific Knowledge Across Domains and Frameworks.

Inked ✍️

  • Canaan Breiss, Hironori Katsuda & Shigeto Kawahara. accepted. “Modeling frequency-conditioned paradigm uniformity in Japanese voiced velar nasalization.” Phonology.

  • Canaan Breiss, Hironori Katsuda & Shigeto Kawahara. accepted. “Token frequency in the grammar: a case study in Japanese voiced velar nasalization” Phonology.

  • Johannes Hein & Andrew Murphy. 2025. “Directional syncretism without directional rules.” Morphology 35. 367–415.

  • Nelli Marutyan. to appear. “Functional Heads as Binders: the Case of Eastern Armenian.” In Proceedings of ConSole 33.

  • Andrew Murphy & Brianna Wilson. 2025. “Discontinuous noun phrases in Iquito.” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. 43(2). 771-825.

  • Gurujegan Murugesan, Imke Driemel & Andrew Murphy. 2025. “Omnivorous person, number and gender in Mundari: A cyclic Agree analysis.” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. 43(2). 1067-1115.

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

  • Canaan Breiss & Jon Gauthier. “Do speech models use phonological features?” CogSci 47, 7/30-8/2, San Francisco.

  • Canaan Breiss, Hironori Katsuda & Shigeto Kawahara. “Variation and breakdown in the saltatory interaction of Rendaku and velar nasalization. Manchester Phonology Meeting 31, 9/29-31, Manchester.

  • Sandra Disner, Vincent van Heuven & Eileen Yang. “Toward an improved American English word list, with frequencies and transcription.” International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics 33, 7/21-23, The Hague.

USC was so densely represented at Interspeech 2025 this summer (8/17-22, Rotterdam) that, despite listing four presentations in our summer digest, we missed these two posters:

  • Xuan Shi, Yubin Zhang, Yijing Lu, Marcus Ma, Tiantian Feng, Asterios Toutios, Haley Hsu, Louis Goldstein, and Shrikanth Narayanan. “75-Speaker Annot-16: A benchmark dataset for speech articulatory rt-MRI annotation with articulator contours and phonetic alignment.”

  • Yubin Zhang, Prakash Kumar, Ye Tian, Ziwei Zhao, Xuan Shi, Kevin Huang, Kevin Lee, Haley Hsu, Shrikanth Narayanan, Krishna Nayak, and Louis Goldstein. “Co-registration of Real-time MRI and Respiration for Speech Research.”

Current USC grads reuniting with alums at Interspeech:

Alumni news: Kim receives PhD from Boston 🎉

Jackie Sihyun Kim, who received her BA in Linguistics from USC in 2013 and a M.S. in Communication Sciences and Disorders from Columbia University, recently defended her PhD dissertation in Boston University’s department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences. She will start a post-doc next month at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, working in a lab that conducts deep brain stimulation research on people with Parkinson’s. At USC, Jackie was USiL president in 2012-2013. She also worked on various research projects with Elsi Kaiser, Khalil Iskarous and Roumyana Pancheva.

Upcoming Events

Department Events

  • Monday, September 29 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: Po-Hsuan Huang

  • Tuesday, September 30 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: MeteOğuz, “Processing retrospective and prospective NPI licensing dependencies”

  • Wednesday, October 1 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: Peter O’Neill

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.

 
 
 

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