32nd edition of WCCFL at USC

This past March 7-9, the USC Linguistics department pulled out all the stops for the 32nd edition of the West Coast Conference in Formal Linguistics (WCCFL). More than 55 scholars presented their work in the different subfields of linguistics, for a total of 90 people in attendance. Keynote addresses were given by Sabine Iatridou, Jaye Padgett, Yael Sharvit and Jon Sprouse. Our own graduate students Canan Ipek, Saurov Syed and Ellen O´Connor spoke of their on-going projects. Great job team, you made us so proud!

The success of WCCFL would not have been possible without the help of all the people from our department that put in their time and effort to make this a great conference. From Andrew and Roumi running things, to the teams that coordinated the schedules for the different tasks, to the faculty that served as chairs for the different sessions, the teams that took care of the coffee breaks, welcome packets, programs, etc– WCCFL took a lot of work! Not to mention hosting scholars at our homes and simply being at the conference willing to lend a helping hand when needed. Hats off to all of you who showed the best of yourselves in this endeavor. Make sure t to visit the WCCFL Flickr site for more great pics!

USC presence at CUNY

The 27th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing took place this year on March 13-15, at the Ohio State University. Many of our students and faculty member Elsi Kaiser presented the following posters:

Differences in the prosodic encoding of information structure in closely-related languages 
Arunima Choudhury and Elsi Kaiser

Non-adjacent lexical dependencies in an artificial language prime relative clause attachment biases 
Hao Wang, Mythili Menon and Elsi Kaiser

Prosodic encoding of information structure depends on frequency and probability 
Iris Chuoying Ouyang and Elsi Kaiser

Beyond syntax: Effects of verb semantics and perspective taking on Chinese reflexives  
Xiao He and Elsi Kaiser

When phonological systems clash: L1 phonotactics vs. L2 assimilation  
David Li and Elsi Kaiser

Congratulations to everyone for their posters! Below are some images, courtesy of Elsi Kaiser (except for the pictures of Elsi herself, which are credited as due at the bottom of each picture).

 Professor Elsi Kaiser, smiling wide by one of her many posters (Picture taken by Florian Jaeger)

 Ouyang, telling all about her work to Amy Schafer (University of Hawaii).

Felix Hao Wang (USC Psychology Dpt) by his poster, which Mythili and Elsi co-authored.

Looks like Elsi is getting very interesting feedback! (Thanks for the pic, Ouyang!)

Congratulations to Sergio!

PhD candidate Sergio Robles-Puente has just accepted a tenure-track position at the World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics Department at the University of West Virginia, starting next semester. Congratulations for a well-deserved position and best of luck!!