Spring 2024 marked a period of remarkable achievement for our lab members.

Vanessa has been actively presenting findings from her PhD research at several prestigious conferences, such as the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD), the American Association of Applied Linguistics Annual Conference (AAAL), and the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). Her work explores semantic competition, syntactic complexity, and passivization in Mandarin relative clauses, as well as the aural processing of Mandarin garden-path sentences by L1, L2, and heritage speakers. An article based on her work on aural processing is forthcoming in the BUCLD 48 Proceedings volume.

Yue has made significant progress in her doctoral studies. Her research focuses on exploring the influence of animacy on the production of English object relative clauses by L1 and L2 speakers. In April, she successfully defended her two preliminary projects employing elicited production tasks and Large Language Models, respectively. The findings of her research were presented at two notable conferences: the 2nd Conference on Theory and Practice of Bilingualism and the Purdue Linguistics Symposium. Yue will, in addition, be presenting a poster at the upcoming International Workshop on Language Production (IWoLP) in Marseille, France.

Yongjia has concluded her undergraduate journey with remarkable accomplishments. In the 2024 Spring Undergraduate Conference, she presented a talk titled “Short Verb Movement in Gan Hakka.” Furthermore, she was honored as the Outstanding Senior from both the Department of Linguistics and the School of Interdisciplinary Studies. Looking ahead, she will start in the PhD program in Language Sciences at the University of Wisconsin this fall.

The ExLing Lab welcomes our new PhD student Golsa Khodadadi! 

Golsa Khodadadi is interested in syntax, discourse, language processing, and second language acquisition. She has an MA in Applied Linguistics from University of Tabriz in Iran with a thesis that examined Verb Phrase Ellipsis in English political discourse and prose fiction. Her more recent research explores the comprehension of Verb Phrase Ellipsis by second language speakers of English.  

Dr. Tom Juzek , Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics at Florida State University, gave a research presentation on December 07 on Gradience in Grammar and the Syntactic Acceptability Dataset.  

During the talk, Dr. Juzek presented the results of previous work with Jana Häussler (2020) on the question of whether gradience in acceptability should be considered as evidence for gradience in grammar. Then he further outlined the ongoing research on building a new dataset that based on COLA (Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability; Warstadt et al. 2018); this new dataset is valuable to both the machine learning community and the linguistic community. In the final step, he connected the previous 2020 results and the ongoing project with recent work in the field, most notably Francis (2022).

Based on his colorful experience in the tech industry and academia in several countries, Dr Juzek also gave a presentation on career paths for Linguistics graduate students on December 8. Following that, our Exling lab members were delighted to have lunch with Dr Juzek, invited him to our lab and had a pleasant discussion about both research projects.