USC at Interspeech 2012

USC had several representatives at the Interspeech 2012 Conference, this year in Portland, Oregon, on September 9-13. The conference covers speech and language processing and includes very interdisciplinary research not only in linguistics but in psychology, engineering, medicine, and other fields. Presenters from the Department of Linguistics, and the topics of their presentations follow:

Accounting for Speech Rate in Spoken Word Recognition

David Li and Elsi Kaiser

Syllable Perception Depends on Tone Perception

Iris Chuoying Ouyang and Khalil Iskarous

Characterizing Covert Articulation in Apraxic Speech Using Real-time MRI

Christina Hagedorn, Michael Proctor, Louis Goldstein, Maria Luisa Gorno-Tempini (UC-San Francisco), Shrikanth Narayanan

Emphatic Segments and Emphasis Spread in Lebanese Arabic: a Real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

Assaf Israel, Michael Proctor, Louis Goldstein, Khalil Iskarous, Shrikanth Narayanan

USC at AMLaP 2012

This year conference of Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) took place in Riva Del Garda, Italy on September 6th-8th. This international conference of interdisciplinary research brings together psychological, computational, and theoretical perspectives on the cognitive mechanisms which underlie any aspect of human language processing. USC’s Linguistics Department is proud to have eight presenters at the AMLaP this year.

Online detection and repair of comparative illusions: Evidence from self-paced reading

Ellen O' Connor, Roumyana Pancheva, and Elsi Kaiser

Positional constraints on incremental adjective interpretation

Katherine McKinney-Bock and Elsi Kaiser

Comprehension of anaphora and cataphora in Italian: Comparing null and overt pronouns

Emily Fedele and Elsi Kaiser

Same subject, different marking: Consequences of case-marking on discourse and memory representations

Lucy Kyoungsook Kim and Elsi Kaiser

Free indirect discourse and perspective taking

Elsi Kaiser and Alexa Cohen

Speech rate mediated lexical ambiguity resolution and the role of articulation

David Li and Elsi Kaiser

USC representatives at GLOW in Asia IX, Japan

Several USC representatives were present in GLOW in Asia IX, Mie University, Japan. Mythili Menon presented a paper on "The Syntax of the Adjective in Dravidian". Priyanka Biswas presented a poster on "Plurality in a Classifier Language: Two Types of Plurals in Bangla". Syed Saurov presented a poster on "DP‐Internal Focus and Topic in Bangla". Yuyun Iris Yang and Roger Liao (USC alum) presented a poster on "Moving to the Left Periphery: Syntax or PF?". USC alumna Fuyun Wu presented a paper on "Audience Design Affects Classifier Positioning in Chinese Relative Clauses: Evidence from Spoken Corpus and Sentence‐Production Data" with Yanan Sheng.

Alumni News

Michael Shepherd (Ph.D. 2010) is starting as a visiting assistant professor at the Spanish Department at the Arizona State University after his two years as a Dornsife Distinguished Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Southern California. 

Erika Varis (Ph.D. 2012) has accepted a position as a Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno, potentially renewable for up to a total of three years.

Congratulations to both of them from the Linguistics Department!

Summer highlights, updates, and so on

Peter Guekguezian joined a group of USC students led by Khalil Iskarous to Taiwan as part of USC's "Problems without Passports" program. He received a NSF grant (along with Khalil and Katy McKinney-Bock) to work on documenting and recording two endangered languages of Taiwan: Squliq Atayal and Saisiyat. Peter spent the month of June hosted by National Tsing Hua University and working with both native speakers of these languages and linguistics colleagues at the university. He got to experience a new culture and cuisine, and visited a village in the mountains where he practiced speaking Saisiyat with the locals. He presented some of his findings at the Austronesian Formal Language Association (AFLA) conference later in June at Academia Sinica in Taipei. 

In lighter news, this summer Peter also visited Argentina, turned 26, and got engaged!

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Christina Hagedorn traveled to New York in July, where she presented her poster, "Characterizing Covert Articulation in Apraxic Speech Using real-time MRI" at the International Workshop on Language Production at NYU.

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Khalil Iskarous has been selected as a recipient of an NSF INSPIRE award, a program designed to fund interdisciplinary, potentially transformative research. Read the press release here. 

Also, Khalil led a group of USC students to Taiwan this June to conduct fieldwork on Atayal and Saisiyat, two endangered Austronesian languages. Read the USC News article here and watch a video here.

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Roumi Pancheva taught at three summer schools: The 6th Linguistic Summer School in the Indian Mountains (LISSIM 6) in Sidhbari, Himachal Pradesh, the 10th New York - St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture, and the 19th Eastern European Summer School of Generative Grammar (The Egg) in Wroclaw, Poland.

In St. Petersburg: some of the students and teachers

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Barbara Tomaszewicz spent her summer in LA, working, and in Europe, co-teaching at the EGG school in Wroclaw, Poland, with Roumi Pancheva, attending the ESSLLI summer school in Opole, Poland, where she presented her experiments on "most" at the Logic & Cognition Workshop, and finally attending the Sinn und Bedeutung conference and the EALing fall school in Paris, France.

At the EGG

Barbara presenting at the Logic & Cognition Workshop

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Rachel Walker has joined the USC Center for Excellence in teaching as a Faculty Fellow and Canan Ipek (recent recipient of a USC Outstanding Teaching Assistant award!) and Xiao He have joined the CET as Teaching Assistant Fellows. They join two fellow linguists in the CET, Ed Finegan, who is the CET director, and David Li, who serves as a Teaching Assistant Fellow.