Berkeley linguists have been very busy this summer! We're happy to share the stories that they submitted to Calques about their summer adventures:
- Keith Johnson led a workshop on "Python tools for Phonetics" at the LSA summer institute and relatedly was awarded a two-year NSF grant for "Next steps in acoustic phonetics research."
- Anna Björklund filed her dissertation, "A Grammar of Nomlaki," and will give an exit talk on highlights of the dissertation in Phorum at 4pm on September 12.
- In May, Keith Johnson and Alexandra Pfiffner presented their collaborative work at the Acoustical Society of America. Their first project presented some preliminary results of acoustic and visual properties of vowels in Oakland, based on their "Voices of Oakland" corpus. The second project demonstrated a computational implementation of the "Cue-based Features" approach to the phonetics/phonology interface.
- In June, Alexandra Pfiffner and co-author Nicole Rosen (U Manitoba) presented their work on "Phonetic correlates of a Canadian Prairies orientation" at the annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association. Later that month, they gave a keynote address at the 14th annual Change and Variation in Canada workshop. The keynote was titled "Social meaning in Manitoba: Expressing hardiness, self-reliance, and survival through consonant variation."
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Larry Hyman spent a month in Paris and Lyon in late May-June, the excuse being the annual business meeting of the France-Berkeley Fund, which he has been directing for 15 years. This included visits to two extraordinary laboratoires: Neurospin, a research center in brain imaging in Saclay, just outside Paris, and the Laboratoire Archéologique Moléculaire et Structurale at the Sorbonne. He spent the rest of the summer working on Limba, an understudied isolate in the Niger-Congo family spoken in Sierra Leone, and enjoying family, especially three grandchildren, the last of whom was born on April 30, which would have been his mother's 100th birthday!
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Gašper Beguš was elevated to the rank of Senior Member at IEEE.
He gave talks or taught classes at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, LSA Summer Institute in Oregon (co-taught with Stephan Meylan), participated in the Schloss Dagstuhl Institute, was an invited panelist at the SIGMORPHON workshop, and gave a plenary at ICHL in Santiago de Chile. Gašper also gave two invited virtual talks, at the Interspecies Internet and an Acoustical Society of America Webinar.
Gašper’s models and AI interpretability techniques inspired parts of a sci-fi book for young audiences, the UFO Files by Kathryn Hulick.
Gašper’s work was featured in NatGeo, the New Scientist, DIE ZEIT, IEEE Spectrum, ITNOW, Fiat Lux Magazine, Animalogic, and Slovenian newspaper of record Delo. -
In May-June 2025, Hannah Sande and PhD students Katherine Russell and Rebecca Jarvis (now officially an alum!) traveled to Côte d'Ivoire to carry out language documentation work, along with their Ivorian collaborators, on four Ivorian languages: Guébie, Atchan, Nghlwa, and Aizi. This work was funded by Oswalt Endangered Language grants and Sande's NSF-CAREER grant (#2236768).
Katherine Russell and Hannah Sande working with Guébie speaker Badiba Olivier Agodio
Katherine Russell and Rebecca Jarvis with Atchan speaker and collaborator Dr. Maxime Dido
- Rhosean Asmah, Niko Schwarz, and Nicole Holliday spent a portion of the summer conducting research for their ICBS-funded grant, "I'ma throw an R in any word that got a U in it: Memphis Rhotacization"
- Zachary O'Hagan spent six weeks in Peru this summer documenting Chamikuro (Arawakan) with Alfonso Patow, Corina Orbe, and Antonio Inuma. There he also visited the Museo Nacional de la Cultura Peruana, guided by Ashaninka leader Najashi Samaniego to view an exhibition of Ashaninka cultural objects he repatriated from the home of anthropologist Gerald Weiss. In August, Zach gave a keynote presentation on information structure at AMAZONICAS X in Belém, Brazil, where he also presented research on extraction in Chamikuro.
- The Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) has had a very active summer! Helena Kansa started as Program Manager in late April. She and Anushah Hossain are now based in Dwinelle 1224 - please drop by and say hello!
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In July, Debbie Anderson and Anushah Hossain served as U.S. national body representatives in the annual ISO/IEC 10646 Universal Coded Character Set meeting held in Niigata, Japan.
- Anushah Hossain participated in a research exchange later that month in the Non-Latin Type Research program at the University of Reading and with the Visual Interactions in Early Writing Systems (VIEWS) Project at the University of Cambridge.
- SEI launched a new website and blog this summer, found at sei.berkeley.edu. The site hosts an interactive map on scripts awaiting digital support, as well as research updates and syllabi related to writing, technology, and society. You can follow along with SEI's work there or via their freshly launched newsletter and Instagram.
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Maksymilian Dąbkowski gave a seminar talk on "The architecture of phonology and its interfaces: Insights from A’ingae" at the University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam.
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Gašper Beguš, Maksymilian Dąbkowski, and Ryan Rhodes published the article "Large linguistic models: Investigating LLMs' metalinguistic abilities" in IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1–15. The research reported in the paper has been covered by various news outlets:
- Chatbots demonstrate language mastery. Grant Powell at ITNOW 67(3), pp. 34–35.
- Wie besonders ist der Mensch? [How special is the human being?] Christoph Drösser at Die Zeit 36, p. 30.
- Chatbots get language on a surprisingly deep level. Michelle Hampson at IEEE Spectrum 8, p. 9.
- As chatbots get smarter, humans’ unique language abilities are becoming less special. Jason Pohl at UC Berkeley News.
- Chatbots don’t just do language, they do metalinguistics. Michelle Hampson at IEEE Spectrum.
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Jhonni Carr spent two glorious months in Mexico this summer completing data analysis and finishing an article on UC Berkeley's linguistic landscape and language policies in relation to its goal of becoming an HSI by 2027. At the end of last semester she was honored to be selected for the Arts & Humanities Teaching Award.
