Summer summary 2023

August 16, 2023

Berkeley linguists have been very busy this summer! We're happy to share the stories that they submitted to Calques during the summer break:

  • Shweta Akolkar, Amber Galvano, Sansan Claude Hien, Rebecca Jarvis, Franco Liu, Anna Macknick, Katherine Russell, Hannah Sande, and Karee Garvin (2021 PhD) presented at the Annual Conference of African Linguistics (ACAL) in Connecticut in June.
  • Shweta Akolkar,  Sansan Claude Hien, Rebecca Jarvis, and Franco Liu presented at SASAL 3: The syntax at the vP edge in African languages in Frankfurt in June.
  • Rebecca Jarvis, Virginia Dawson (2020 PhD), Peter Jenks, and Hannah Sande presented at TripleA 10 in Potsdam in June (photo below).
  • Amber Galvano, Emily Grabowski, Yevgeniy Melguy, Keith Johnson, Alexandra Pfiffner, and Karee Garvin (2021 PhD) presented at the 20th ICPhS in Prague this August.
  • Maksymilian Dąbkowski is currently on a fieldwork trip in Sinangoé to research A'ingae. 
  • Wesley dos Santos conducted fieldwork research and revitalization activities for ten weeks in the lands of the Juma and Uru Eu Wau Wau peoples from NW Brazil. A special mention goes to the organization of the panel The Juma: memory, culture, identity, and language preservation, which featured the three fluent speakers of Juma, and served as an effort to counteract a coerced language shift within the community (photo below). The panel was made possible through a CLAS grant and the recording will be available on their website soon.
  • Amber Galvano spent much of this summer travelling, first for a tour in Portugal with the UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus, and then to Storrs, CT for a talk at ACAL on the Lobi vowel space. She then spent two weeks in Buenos Aires, Argentina, conducting a sociophonetic study on production and perception of /st/ variation by Porteño Spanish speakers. Finally, Amber gave a talk at ICPhS (co-authored with Nick Henriksen) in Prague, on the implications of /st/ variation across dialects of Spanish for sound change.
  • Noah Hermalin presented ongoing work on quantification of writing system typological category membership at ACL 2023's Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL) in Toronto. The workshop paper can be found in the ACL Anthology here
  • Rebecca Jarvis, Katherine Russell, and Berkeley undergraduate Lindsay Hatch, along with Kouadio Timothée Kouame, conducted in-person documentary work with speakers of Atchan (also called Ébrié; Kwa) in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.  In collaboration with community members, the group recorded and transcribed stories, songs, and texts and conducted elicitation (photo below). Russell also worked with speakers of Guébie in Gnagbodougnoa, Côte d'Ivoire.
  • Allegra Robertson spent the summer in southern Italy, researching Barese and Cosentino (minority Romance dialects spoken in Bari and Cosenza, respectively). She worked with consultants to document stories and poetry, and to investigate (pre)aspiration in geminate production. 
  • Katherine Russell published an article on 'The phonology of Atchan' in Language & Linguistics Compass: 
  • Oliver Whitmore published an article about the development of courses on minority languages and cultures in France. He also was invited to sit for an interview with the cultural magazine Lo Diari to discuss his involvement in Occitan culture and language awareness here at Berkeley. If you are interested in learning more about the Occitan Studies working group, please contact Oliver (whitmore.1@berkeley.edu). 
  • Gašper Beguš gave an invited talk entitled “Generative AI and What Is Meaningful in Sperm Whale Communication" at the Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species II workshop at the Simons Institute and another entitled “Modeling language from raw speech in an unsupervised way” at the University of Oregon. He also taught a course on "Deep Language Learning: Modeling language from raw speech" at the ESSLLI summer school in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2023) with Alan Zhou on "Interpreting intermediate convolutional layers of generative CNNs trained on waveforms.'' 
  • Beguš and the work from his Berkeley Speech & Computation lab were featured in Quanta Magazine, Nautilus Magazine (https://www.quantamagazine.org/some-neural-networks-learn-language-like-humans-20230522/), and Atmos Magazine (https://atmos.earth/the-scientists-learning-to-speak-whale/).