Weekly Digest, 4/22/24

Happy Earth Day and last week of classes! (This will also be the final SCLing Wrap-up of the semester.)

If you have news to share over the summer, please submit your news using the link here. We will be transferring editorship of the department newsletter over the summer, and submissions via email may be lost. Thanks for helping us keep up with what’s ✨fresh✨ at USC Linguistics.

Congratulations 👏

Round of applause for Audrey Joachim (Linguistics and Anthropology undergraduate major and USiL Vice President) for her 1st prize in Social Sciences at the Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly & Creative Work! Audrey writes: “I will be using the award to expand this project into my undergraduate anthropology thesis, which will employ semiotics and linguistic theory to analyze archival data.”

Thank you to Elsi Kaiser for the photo!

Look Who’s Talking 🗣️

Several linguistics undergraduates participated in The Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Work on Wednesday, April 17, 2024! Congrats to all!

• Ashley Adji, Jacob Denina, Troy Kadonaga, and Andy Zhang. “What’s in a last name? Exploring perceptions of different kinds of last names.” (Linguistics faculty mentor: Elsi Kaiser, Language Processing Lab.)
• Raya Clarke. “Creations of Queer Masculine Identity through African American Vernacular English.” (Linguistics faculty mentor: Stephanie Shih)
• Audrey Joachim. “The Phenomenology of Silence: A Spatial Ethnography of the Little Chapel of Silence.”

Lots more talks by members of the department these past few weeks as well:

• Hailin Hao. “Information Locality in Sentence Processing”. Language Science Community Talk. UC Irvine Language Science Department, April 16.
• Canaan Breiss. “Testing Base-specificity in Lexical Conservatism”. WCCFL 24. Berkeley, CA. (see photo from Canaan below)
• Khalil Iskarous and Jennifer Mather (Scientific advisor on the Oscar-winning My Octopus Teacher) presented two posters at the CephNeuro2024 conference: “A winnerless competition transient dynamic can specify Cephalopod chromatic skin displays” and “Octopus arm action program choices for a coordinated task.” (see photo from Khalil below)

Upcoming Events

Department Events

• Monday, April 22 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: Canaan Breiss, “Token frequency in the grammar: evidence from Japanese voiced velar nasalization”
• Tuesday, April 23 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: Mete Oğuz, “Investigating syntactic effects in NPI illusions in Turkish”
• Wednesday, April 24 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: Alexis Wellwood, TBA

USiL Events

Please check out https://www.usilusc.org/ for the latest on Undergraduate Students in Linguistics (USiL) events this semester.