Author: ewittenberg

We are very happy to announce that the graduate students working at the Language Comprehension Lab will be represented at AMLaP with one full talk and two short talks:

• Full talk:
  Joshua Wampler & Eva Wittenberg:
  Discourse structure affects reference resolution to events
• Short talks:
  Ebru Evcen & Eva Wittenberg:
  The consideration of alternatives during incremental comprehension of counterfactuals
  Carson Miller Rigoli, Mickaël Pruvost, Annie Colin & Eva Wittenberg:
  PASCAL: Pressure Analysis for Studying Cognition, Autonomic Function, and Language

Congratulations to all — see you virtually or in Paris in September!

As the LCL looked back on this year, we focused on the Good Things that have happened! Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of things to celebrate (even over Zoom):

1. Research went really well (considering, well, a pandemic and the complete closure of the lab since March 2020)! For instance,
   • Ebru Evcen (with the help of Lea and Miguel) managed to collect beautiful eye-tracking data online, using people’s webcam. A revolution born out of necessity, but impressive—and very practical—nonetheless!
   • Josh Wampler got his first single-author paper accepted, in Glossa!
   • We had/have five new papers coming out of the lab since the beginning of the academic year (Fall 2020), in Cognition and Glossa, among others, and four more are under review!
2. We gained back an old friend! Miguel Meija, one of LCL’s first Research Assistants, came back as a volunteer. We are extremely lucky to have him, his enthusiasm, and his expertise back!
3. Our people are off to Great Things!
   • Ruoqi Wei will be attending USC for a PhD in theoretical linguistics. Currently, she’s been working on research in the pragmatics of courtroom linguistics, as well as the pragmatics of verbs of veracity (it is right that, it is correct that, etc), but during graduate school, she hopes to expand my research beyond just courtroom data, and explore more formal semantics. Congratulations, Ruoqi!
   • Lea Zaric got accepted into the “Elite Master Program in Neuro-Cognitive Psychology” at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, as one of only 12-13 students out of nearly 1000 applicants. Having discovered a passion for cognitive science and linguistics at UCSD, Lea is now seeking to deepen her understanding of the brain and to further explore her interests in such areas of cognition as language, memory, and their dysfunction resulting from neuropathologies. Congratulations, Lea!
   • Mohit Gurumukhani will be joining the Computer Science PhD program at Cornell University, generously supported by a first year fellowship by Cornell University. Mohit is broadly interested in studying computational complexity theory and pseudorandomness (who isn’t, really?). He will investigate questions such as: What are the minimal resources required for solving natural computational tasks? What is the power of randomness in speeding up computation and in low memory computation? Can we create faster theoretical algorithms for satisfying boolean formulas? Congratulations, Mohit!
   • Our first-year graduate student Ebru Evcen will be participating in a fully-funded four-day summer school on anaphora and presupposition at the University of Göttingen, Germany. The fall school offers both theoretical and empirical courses covering the two phenomena from cross-linguistics and cross-modular perspectives. Ebru aims to become familiar with dynamic semantics and strengthen the theoretical motivation of her research on counterfactuals learning more about how a set of possible worlds in counterfactuals is dependent on context and evolves with the discourse. Congratulations, Ebru!

…and congratulations to all our graduating seniors!

We wish everyone a restful, relaxed, and interesting summer — thank you!

Our first-year Graduate Student Ebru Evcen has submitted a successful application to participate in the Göttingen fall school in linguistics on anaphora and presuppositions. Congratulations, Ebru!

Eva will give two talks in Europe next week, representing the truly cross-linguistic work the lab has been working on:

The first talk will take place at the conference Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning (X-PPL) in Zurich, and Eva will present joint work with Ashwini Vaidya (IIT Delhi) on processing light verbs in Hindi in the their talk Practice makes perfect: Frequency of language-wide predicational strategy eases processing cost in Hindi light verb constructions.The second talk will take place at the 14. Bayerisch-Österreichischen Dialektologentagung in Salzburg, where Eva and her collaborator Andreas Trotzke will talk about their work on a variety of Bavarian: Mogst a weng a Schnitzala? Eine psycholinguistische Untersuchung zur referenziellen Verkleinerungsfunktion in ostfränkischen Nominalphrasen.

The Lab will be represented at AMLaP Moscow with one talk (Talk B2)

Björn Lundquist, Martin Corley, Eva Wittenberg:
Priming of (in)transitivity in reading

…and one poster:

Mohammad Momenian, Shuk Ka Cham, Jafar Mohammadamini, Eva Wittenberg, Brendan Weekes, William Marslen-Wilson:
Contrasting Cross-linguistic Effects of Semantic Transparency: Evidence from Cantonese and Farsi Compounds

See you in Moscow!