Nicole Holliday will be giving a micro-keynote on April 27 at the CHI 2025 Workshop on Speech AI for All: Promoting Accessibility, Fairness, Inclusivity, and Equity in Yokohama, Japan!
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April 21, 2025
Larry Hyman has been invited to be the commencement speaker at the UCLA Linguistics Department Graduation on June 15, 2025. UCLA is also Larry's alma mater.
April 18, 2025
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
- Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Apr 23 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
Zachary O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): "What was the language of the Tabalosos, Lamas, and Suchiches of Peru? Evidence from a 17th-century Census and Sacramental Records" - Phorum - Friday Apr 18 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
Irene Yi (Stanford): "Axes of Differentiation and Language Ideologies in Mountain vs. Town variation of /l/ alveo-palatalization in Ganguhua" - Phorum - Friday Apr 25 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
Antón de la Fuente (Stanford): "Ideological Change and Phonological Variation in the Galician of O Grove" - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 18 - Dwinelle 1303 - 11am-12:10pm
Practice talks for WCCFL:
- "Perceptual adaptation in Spanish: Implications for vowel-specific factors in the learning of novel accents" (Niko Schwarz)
- "Feature interaction in the Tira agreement complex" (Peter Jenks) - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 18 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Katherine Johnson (Stanford): "Focus and clefts in Tiriki: Evidence for hyperactivity" - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 25 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Andrew Simpson (USC): "Obligatory object shift in Chinese: Aspect, definiteness, and affectedness"
April 17, 2025
Isaac L. Bleaman will be one of the plenary speakers at the 31st Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference, taking place on May 2-3, 2025, at the University of North Texas. The title of his talk is "Social Dimensions of Variation in Yiddish: Historical Perspectives and New Insights."
Keith Johnson presented a colloquium talk on "Vowels in the brain" to the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh on Friday, April 11. While there he also served as an outside committee member for an undergrad honors thesis.
April 15, 2025
Congratulations to our own Meg Cychosz (PhD 2020), who has just accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University!
Congratulations to our own Karee Garvin (PhD 2021), who has just accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University!
April 11, 2025
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
- Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Apr 14 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
Yi Ting Huang (Maryland): "Learning language, fast and slow: How to overcome sparse data and signal degradation during real-time processing and development" - Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group and Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Apr 16 - Dwinelle 3335 - 3-4pm, followed by a light Passover-friendly reception
Sarah Bunin Benor (Hebrew Union College): "Language Endangerment and Reclamation in Jewish Communities Today" - Phorum - Friday Apr 11 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
Yi Ting Huang (Maryland): "Measuring trust in research participation: A case study on SES variation in language development" - Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Apr 14 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
Talk by Marguerite Morlan - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 18 - Location TBA - 11am-12:30pm
Practice talks for WCCFL:
- "Feature interaction in the Tira agreement complex" (Peter Jenks)
- "Perceptual adaptation in Spanish: Implications for vowel-specific factors in the learning of novel accents" (Nikolai Andrés Schwarz-Acosta)
- "Transitive subject relativization restriction in Northern Tujia and beyond" (Kang Franco Liu) - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 18 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Katherine Johnson (Stanford): "Focus and clefts in Tiriki: Evidence for hyperactivity"
April 10, 2025
Congratulations to Maksymilian Dąbkowski, whose article "Deglottalizing contamination in A’ingae historical derivatives" was published in Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America!
Julia Peck gave a talk at ucLADINO, the annual Ladino language conference hosted by UCLA, where she launched the digital version of her at-home language nesting project, Ladino en Kaza. The project equips Ladino learners to create a language nest in their kitchens. She was recently awarded a Diller Family Foundation fellowship to support the project's continuation and expansion into more rooms of the home.
Congratulations to Nafisa Rashid, who has received the FLAS Fellowship for Japan to study at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies for the summer!
April 7, 2025
Jhonni Carr delivered a live-streamed lecture at la Universidad Autónoma de Campeche on April 2 titled "Come work from Mexico, it’s truly magical: la gentrificación lingüística de Mazunte, Oaxaca."
April 6, 2025
The 2024-2025 colloquium series concludes on Monday, April 14, with a talk by Yi Ting Huang (Maryland), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. The title of her talk is "Learning language, fast and slow: How to overcome sparse data and signal degradation during real-time processing and development." The abstract is as follows:
Traditional approaches to language development focus on relationships between aggregate inputs (e.g., total words heard) and outcomes (e.g., vocabulary size), assuming that what parents say is what children learn. This, of course, ignores an obvious fact about acquisition – Children initially have no idea what parents are talking about. Instead, they must infer linguistic representations through iterative encounters with sentences. To better understand these processes, I will introduce three lines of research that describe developmental algorithms for sentence processing, and their variation with language experience and impairment status. First, I will examine how 4- to 6-year-olds determine who did what to whom in sentences, and show ways in which their strategies vary with properties of the communicative context. Second, I will take a closer look at SES language gaps, and show how systematic variation in language experiences preserve learning ability but alter sentence-processing strategies. Finally, we will turn to children with Developmental Language Disorder, who face profound difficulties producing, understanding, and learning from language in the school-aged years. We present preliminary findings from a randomized controlled trial to alter sentence processing and improve comprehension. We will close by considering causal pathways between chronometric and ontogenetic processes, and discuss their implications for how children recreate language from input, what a satisfying algorithmic-level description of language acquisition might look like, and why more cognitive scientists should be working at the intersection of basic and translational research.
April 4, 2025
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
- 9th Annual Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium - Saturday Apr 5 - Dwinelle 3335 - 10am-4:25pm
The symposium is being organized by the Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUgS) at UC Berkeley. Click here to see the full schedule. - Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Apr 9 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
Andrew Garrett (UC Berkeley): "Undamming the Klamath River: Pecwan Jim's 'Upriver coyote' creation story" - Phorum - Friday Apr 4 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
John Harris (University College London): "Gauging segmental prominence" - Phorum - Friday Apr 11 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
Yi Ting Huang (University of Maryland): "Measuring trust in research participation: A case study on SES variation in language development" - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 4 - Dwinelle 1303 (no Zoom option) - 3-4:30pm
Jasper Jian (Stanford): "From the Igbo left periphery to the functional sequence" - Syntax and Semantics Circle - Thursday Apr 10 (note the day) - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
Talk by Hashmita Agarwal (UCLA)
April 3, 2025
Congratulations to Amy Rose Deal and Justin Royer (Université de Montréal), whose article "Mayan animacy hierarchy effects and the dynamics of Agree" has just been published online in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory!
Isaac L. Bleaman will be giving a research talk for the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Toronto on Thursday, April 10. The title of his talk is "Preserving the Past, Forging the Future: Digital Voices in Yiddish Studies." He will also be leading a workshop for Yiddish instructors on Friday, April 11 titled "אױספּאַקן דעם טערמינאָלאָגישן באַגאַזש: מכּוח ייִדישע װערבן" (When Less Is More: On Yiddish Grammatical Terminology).
April 2, 2025
Calques is saddened to report the passing of Berkeley Linguistics PhD alumna Miriam R. L. Petruck.
Dr. Petruck was active in the linguistics research community until her passing. She recently received a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Award to create a FrameNet-inspired database of structured information about the experiences of Holocaust survivors.
April 1, 2025
Congratulations to Justin Davidson on receiving the 2025 Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award in recognition of his outstanding commitment to graduate student success.
An interview with Isaac L. Bleaman about Yiddish corpus development was just published in In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. Click here to read it!
March 31, 2025
Gašper Beguš appeared in Berkeley News with a video explaining his work on AI and language in 101 seconds. Click here to see it!
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