The department newsletter of the Department of Linguistics at UCLA
Volume 10 (2009-10, prepared June 2010)
Contents of this issue
Royce Hall, UCLA
| Linguistics
Notes
The department newsletter of the Department of Linguistics at UCLA Volume 10 (2009-10, prepared June 2010)
Contents of this issue |
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Professor
Megha
Sundara has been awarded a three-year, $390640 grant from the National
Science Foundation for her laboratory studies of language acquisition in
infants and toddlers. The title of the grant is
Development
of Native Language Preference: Behavioral and Physiological Indices.
Graduate student Victoria Thatte, for whom Sundara serves as co-adviser, has been awarded a dissertation grant, also from the NSF, for her experimental work on phonotactic learning in infants. |
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Professor Sun-Ah Jun has received a five-year, $477,644 NSF grant with three co-PI's (Janet Oh of Cal State Northridge, Terry Au of the University of Hong Kong, and Richard Lee of University of Minnesota). The title of the grant is "The Role of Childhood Language Memory in Adult Language Learning: Korean Adoptees Learning Korean as Adults". The grant application was based on extraordinary pilot results obtained by the PI's, which suggest that even relatively brief exposure to a particular language early in life can have beneficial long-term effects in facilitating later acquisition of that language. |
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Professor Patricia Keating is a co-PI on a new $450,000 grant awarded by the NSF to Abeer Alwan in Electrical Engineering, "A New Voice Source Model: From Glottal Areas to Better Speech Synthesis". Jody Kreiman in Head & Neck Surgery is also a co-PI. The 3-year grant will be awarded some time this summer. The goals of the project are to collect and make public a database of high-speed, high-resolution movies of vibrating vocal folds; and to use this database to develop a model of vocal fold vibration and voice production that can be used to improve voice quality in synthetic speech. The pilot data used in this proposal came from the current collaborative project among these three UCLA researchers, Production and Perception of Linguistic Voice Quality (Sept. 2007-August 2011, $455,999.) |
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Emeritus Professor Thomas Hinnebusch and Dr. Barbara Blankenship have won a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to conduct a 3-year survey of the digital materials currently available for teaching less-commonly taught languages. The research will be carried out by the UCLA Language Materials Project, where Hinnebusch is principal investigator and Blankenship is research coordinator. The Project's website provides scholarly citations of over 8000 teaching materials for 150 languages, along with lesson plans, language profiles, and language-related links. Besides disseminating the survey results to language planners and teachers, the researchers intend to add citations of at least 1000 digital materials to the online database. |
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Congratulations to our first-year graduate students who won prestigious
multiyear fellowship awards in this year's competitions:
Our students did very well in UCLA-internal fellowships as well:
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Michael Tseng |
The department has implemented a scholarship program in honor of the late Professor Peter Ladefoged. The scholarship support graduate student research projects within the Department. This year's winners were Kristine Yu and Robyn Orfitelli.
You can read about the winners' research projects (all years) at the Scholarship Page.
Brooke Lillehaugen (Ph.D. 2006) will be beginning a two-year position as a Lecturer in Linguistics in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Jieun Kim (Ph.D. 2010) as taken up a tenured full-time lecturer position in University of Ulsan, Korea, her alma mater. Jieun finished her Ph.D in February 2010 (Co-chairs: Russ Schuh and Sun-Ah Jun).
Lawrence Cheung (Ph.D. 2008) will be taking up a tenure track Assistant Professor position in August at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Ingvar Lofstedt (Ph.D. 2010) will be a visiting Lecturer for 2010-2011 in the Linguistics Department at Macalester College. Ingvar finished his Ph.D. in June 2010 (Co-chairs: Kie Zuraw and Bruce Hayes)
Sameer Khan (Ph.D. 2008) will be a visiting Lecturer for 2010-2011 in the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University. During this academic year, Sameer taught at Pitzer Colllege, Cornell University, and UCLA.
Tim Arbisi-Kelm (Ph.D. 2005) has started a tenure track Assistant Professor position in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders in Augustana College.
Adam Albright (Ph.D. 2002) was awarded tenure in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT, where he is an Associate Professor.
Graduate student Marc Garellek won the Best Paper in Speech Communication Award at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Baltimore.
Graduate student Nancy Ward won the Best Paper in Speech Communication at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in San Antonio.
Graduate student Thomas Graf was awarded the prize for Best Student Paper at the European Summer School for Language, Logic, and Information) at the University of Bordeaux.
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Department members continue to be active in linguistic fieldwork.
Laura McPherson (shown) is currently in Mali, working on Dogon languages in collaboration with Prof. Jeffrey Heath of the University of Michigan. Jianjing Kuang visited villages in Southwestern China during the summer, collecting extensive phonetic data on regional languages. |
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Distinguished Professor Edward Keenan has been selected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was cited for "distinguished contributions in several different subfields of linguistics, including semantics, syntax, mathematical linguistics, language typology, and Austronesian linguistics (especially work on Malagasy)." |
Bloomfield Award for Pamela Munro and Catherine Willmond
Munro and Willmond receiving |
Professor
Pamela
Munro and long time research collaborator Catherine Willmond have won
the 2010
Bloomfield
Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America for their book Let's
Speak Chickasaw, Chikashshanompa' Kilanompoli. The newsletter UCLA
Today describes the work as follows:
"The biennial award, presented by the Linguistic Society of America since 1992, recognizes "the volume which makes the most outstanding contribution to the development of our understanding of language and linguistics." The first textbook of the Chickasaw language and its first complete grammar, Let's Speak Chickasaw evolved from a book used for over a decade in a course on American Indian linguistics taught by Munro with assistance from Willmond. A Los Angeles resident, Willmond is an elder of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and a member of the Chickasaw Nation Hall of Fame. Munro is a noted authority on dictionary creation whose credits include dictionaries of Zapotec, Wolof and UCLA Slang. Focusing on conversational language, Munro and Willmond created an alphabet for the Chickasaw language based on earlier writing systems for Choctaw. The authors hope the book will help prevent the disappearance of the Chickasaw language, which is an endangered language spoken today by fewer than 200 people, primarily in the Chickasaw Nation of south-central Oklahoma. "Chikashshanompa'" is Chickasaw for "Chickasaw language." “Kilanompoli'” means "let's speak." |
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José María Lahoz (Ph.D. candidate at Computense University of Madrid, Spain) visited our department during this year, working under the direction of Prof. Pat Keating with support from an FPU grant awarded by the Spanish Ministry for Science. His research on the correlation between the articulatory gestures and the aerodynamic properties of Spanish consonants made use of the EMA (electromagnetic articulography) system in the Phonetics Lab, revitalizing our manuals and resources for this equipment. |  |
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Three of our grad students,
Heather
Burnett, Thomas Graf (pictured),
and Melanie Bervoets, attended ESSLLI '09
(The European Summer School for Language,
Logic, and Information) at the University of Bordeaux. Thomas presented
a paper at the student session, and was awarded the prize for Best Student
Paper.
At the same institute, two of our faculty (Ed Keenan and Ed Stabler) taught a course on an algebraic approach to natural language syntax and semantics. Two of our former students also co-taught courses: Greg Kobele, on Minimalist Grammars, and Nathan Klinedinst on Presupposition. |
| As always, the first year graduate students studied very hard, often together. |  |
| But they also found time to go out for a meal of Ethiopian food. |  |
| The most picturesque images of the year were taken at the fall Halloween Party. |  |
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Thanks to Laura Kalin for the pictures.