News

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.

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)

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.

In and around the Department of Linguistics today and in the week following Spring Break:

• Phorum - Friday Mar 21 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Talk by Rhosean Asmah (UC Berkeley)
• Phorum - Friday Apr 4 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  John Harris (University College London): "Gauging segmental prominence"
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Mar 31 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Talk by Sarah Ertel (UC Berkeley)
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 21 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Masoud Jasbi (UC Davis): "Definiteness and plurality in a language with no definite determiner and two types of plurals"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Apr 4 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Talk by Jasper Jian (Stanford)

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

• Thanks to the efforts of Shweta Akolkar and Wendy Costa, we've accessioned a second series to the Heather Hardy Collection of Tolkapaya Yavapai Language Materials, consisting of 23 cassette recordings of Molly Fasthorse (1910-2000). Yavapai is a Yuman language of Arizona. The recordings span collaborations at UCLA in the late 1970s and at the University of North Texas in 1981.

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

• Linguistics Department Colloquium - Monday Mar 17 - Dwinelle 370 and Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) - 3:10-4:30pm
  Kathryn Davidson (Harvard): "Information Structure Insights from Sign Language Anaphora"
• Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Mar 19 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4pm
  Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley): "Some challenges of establishing focus structure through elicitation"
• Phorum - Friday Mar 14 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Cooper Bedin (UC Santa Barbara): "Towards participant-driven analyses in sociolinguistic studies of gender and sexuality"
• Phorum - Friday Mar 21 - Dwinelle 1229 - 4-5pm
  Talk by Rhosean Asmah (UC Berkeley)
• Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley - Monday Mar 17 - Dwinelle 5125 and Zoom - 2-3pm
  Discussion of Hall-Lew 2024
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 14 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley): "Cross-clausal movement and its limits"
• Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Mar 21 - Dwinelle 1303 and Zoom - 3-4:30pm
  Talk by Masoud Jasbi (UC Davis)

Last week Amy Rose Deal traveled to Massachusetts to give talks at UMass and in the MIT colloquium series (on case sensitivity in syntax), along with a ling-lunch talk on de re attitude reports.

Congratulations to Nicole Holliday and Paul E. Reed (University of Alabama) on the publication of their article "Gender and racial bias issues in a commercial 'tone of voice' analysis system" in PLoS ONE!

The 2024-2025 colloquium series continues on Monday, March 17, with a talk by Kathryn Davidson (Harvard), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. Her talk is entitled "Information Structure Insights from Sign Language Anaphora." The abstract is as follows:

Notions of topic and focus have been well-studied in sign languages, which - like many spoken languages - tend to have word orders highly influenced by information structural considerations, along with perhaps some modality-specific considerations provided by suprasegmental "non-manuals" and other simultaneous expression, the tight integration of iconic depiction into the grammatical structure, etc. The use of three-dimensional signing space for tracking referents across a discourse is often considered to be another modality-specific feature, bearing on questions about the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic representation of anaphora in language more generally and how anaphoricity relates to other notions like definiteness, givenness, and contrast. This talk will provide new empirical arguments from sign languages for how the expression of contrast falls out as a consequence of marking (explicit and implicit) discourse familiarity and non-identity and what this means for how we should think about the relationship between anaphoricity, alternatives, and information structure.