News

Our own Myriam Lapierre (PhD 2021; currently Assistant Professor at the University of Washington) will be moving to McGill University, where she has accepted a position as Assistant Professor, starting in January 2026.

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

• Linguistics Undergraduate Honors Colloquium - Monday May 5 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom - 3:10pm
  Presentations by Sarah Ertel and Lindsay Hatch
• Phorum - Friday May 2 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Max Kaplan (UC Santa Cruz): "Phonotactics in speech perception: A crosslinguistic comparison of repair in onset clusters"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday May 2 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley): "Case sensitivity reflects case structure: Agreement, extraction, and clitics"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday May 9 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Shweta Akolkar (UC Berkeley): "Two structures for modal clauses in Marathi and implications for case"

In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:

• Ladino/Judeo-Spanish Working Group - Thursday May 1 - Dwinelle 1303 - 4-5pm
  Ora de Echar Lashon (beginner-friendly conversation hour) with discussions of May Day and Ladino poetry across time and space!
• Language Revitalization Working Group - Wednesday Apr 30 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Panel: Revitalization and re-awakening sleeping and near-sleeping languages, with Chelsi Sparti (Wintun), Jonathan Cirelli (Habematolel Pomo), and Shaunie Briggs (Salinan)
• Phorum - Friday Apr 25 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Antón de la Fuente (Stanford): "Ideological Change and Phonological Variation in the Galician of O Grove"
• Phorum - Friday May 2 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Max Kaplan (UC Santa Cruz): "Phonotactics in speech perception: A crosslinguistic comparison of repair in onset clusters"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Apr 28 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Talk by Verónica Grajeda
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 25 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Andrew Simpson (USC): "Obligatory object shift in Chinese: Aspect, definiteness, and affectedness"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday May 2 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley): "Case sensitivity reflects case structure: Agreement, extraction, and clitics"

BayPhon, taking place at UC Santa Cruz on May 10, will feature the following presentations by Berkeley linguists:

• Rhosean Asmah: "Coronal stop deletion in Megan Thee Stallion's rap and casual speech"
• Maksymilian Dąbkowski: "Missing glottalization in some A'ingae nouns: A diachronic perspective"
• Julianne Kapner: "Varying vowels in Bay Area Armenian"

Amanda Boomershine (UNC Wilmington) and Keith Johnson published an article entitled "The influence of language experience on speech perception: Heritage Spanish speaker perception of contrastive and allophonic consonants" in a special issue of the journal Languages.

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"

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"

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."

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.