A warm welcome to 7 students of the incoming graduate class!
From left to right: Maddy, Kiki, Hiro, Z.L., Canaan, Christine, and Andy.
Our newest cohort provided short biographical information for us.
Madeleine “Maddy” Booth
M.Phil., University of Cambridge; B.A., Swarthmore College
- Areas of interest: morphosyntax, phonology, language conservation
- Hobbies: bread baking, origami, knitting, satire, kayaking, and running half-marathons
- Fun fact: Maddy wanted to be molecular biologist before discovering linguistics.
Canaan Breiss
via 1 year in UCLA PIES; B.A., Swarthmore College
- Areas of interest: phonology, learnability, phonology-(morpho)syntax interface issues and “upstream” phonological effects in the grammar, experimental phonology (corpus, laboratory, psycholinguistic methods), modeling (phonological) variation, sandhi
- Hobbies: singing, going to museums
- Fun fact: Canaan was voted both “Hardest Working” and “Most Likely to Open a Burrito Stand After Graduation” by his high school class.
Katsuda “Hiro” Hironori
University College London
- Areas of interest: phonology, phonetics, morphology
- Hobbies: table tennis, Japanese calligraphy
- Fun fact: In 2011, Hiro visited UCLA for his first overseas trip. Now, he is very happy to be back here.
Minqi “Kiki” Liu
B.A., Peking University
- Areas of interest: syntax, semantics, and language acquisition
- Hobbies: swimming and fencing
- Fun fact: The literal meaning of Kiki’s Chinese name is an “agile flag”.
Christine Prechtel
The Ohio State University
- Areas of interest: phonetics, intonation, speech perception
Zhongshi “Andy” Xu
B.A., UCLA
- Areas of interest: phonology, prosody-syntax interface
- Hobbies: traveling, sketching, photography
- Fun fact: Andy entered UCLA as an undeclared-major freshman four years ago. For the first two years Andy had his mind set on studying industrial design. During the last quarter of his second year, Andy applied for admission into the Design program at UCLA, was rejected, and decided to declare a major in Linguistics instead.
Zhenglong “Z.L.” Zhou
B.A., Swarthmore College
- Areas of interest: Phonology, intonation
- Hobbies: Poetry, singing, divination, photography
- Fun fact: In undergrad, Z.L. led an a cappella that only sang non-American music.
Please also welcome our Departmental Scholars Ang and Neda.
Ang Li
- Areas of interest: syntax, semantics
- Hobbies: culinary creation, styling, reading
Neda Vesselinova
- Areas of interest: computational linguistics, syntax, semantics