Honors

Joyce Tao — Joyce graduated in Winter 2025 with a B.A. in Linguistics and Psychology. Her academic focus centers on sociolinguistics, particularly the intersections of language, identity, and society. She was captivated by code-switching as a lens to examine how linguistic adaptability shapes cultural cognition and social belonging.

Monique Wong — Monique graduated in Winter 2025 with a B.A. in Linguistics and Computer Science. She has a strong interest in computational linguistics and neurolinguistics, with research experience in parsing and natural language processing. After graduation, Monique plans to take a brief hiatus from academia to travel, explore new places, and perhaps pick up a few languages along the way. P.S. She loves the challenge of ordering food in a language she doesn’t understand.

Michelle Chan — Michelle graduated in Fall 2023 with a B.A. in Linguistics and Psychology. Her inspiration stems from her role as a research assistant in various labs, including linguistics and cognitive psychology. Those experiences have ignited her passion for research. She is particularly interested in bilingualism and code-switching thus her senior research project focused on exploring the code-switching pattern of Cantonese-English bilinguals. Following graduation, Michelle intends to pursue further studies in graduate school while continuing her work with the UCLA linguistics and psychology labs during her gap year.

Anna Tong — Anna graduated in June 2024, double majoring in Linguistics & Computer Science and Cognitive Science. During her senior year, she completed a study on the language of trauma, linguistically analyzing Ukrainian trauma narratives as a UCLA/Keck Humanistic Inquiry Undergraduate Research Fellow. Her present research interest focuses on applications of language and computation in the context of studying trauma and trauma healing. She will continue this research through the Cognitive Science MSc program at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics beginning Fall 2024. Following this, she looks forward to further pursuing this research through a PhD.

Kendall Vanderwouw — Kendall graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BA in Linguistics & Anthropology and a minor in Scandinavian Studies. After finishing high school at 16, she began her 3-year-long studies in Linguistics at UCLA, focusing on Sociolinguistics. Her thesis tested the roots of mutual intelligibility in Scandinavian languages, with an emphasis on native Swedish speakers. Kendall conducted additional research in intercultural communication during her two study abroad programs (in Denmark and on Semester at Sea). Next year, she will begin her Master’s studies in Applied Cultural Analysis at Lund University in Sweden.

Zhuying (Emily) Gong — Zhuying (Emily) Gong graduated in Spring 2024 with a double major in Linguistics and Mathematics of Computation. In her senior year, she worked closely with Dr. David Goldstein and applied a Bayesian mixture model on Greek data to detect language contacts. She will be working full time postgrad but hopes to eventually pursue a PhD in linguistics.

Mario Peng Lee — Mario Peng Lee graduated with a B.A. in Linguistics & Computer Science, a double major in Psychology, and a minor in Data Science Engineering. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, he collaborated across multiple disciplines, focusing on the ethical development of AI. His honors thesis, under Maura O’Leary, led to the Diverse Names Generator, combating bias in linguistic examples. This work was presented at the LSA conference, where he received the Linguistics Travel and Research Award. Mario also served as an Undergraduate Research Scholar and editor for the Undergraduate Research Journal of Psychology.

Kelly Eun — Kelly graduated in June 2024 with a B.A. in Applied Linguistics. Since learning about sentence processing models in LING 132, she has been interested in language comprehension and the interface between syntax and semantics. Using self-paced incremental reading tasks, her senior research project examined how bilingualism could affect parsing decisions on sentences with local ambiguity. Kelly hopes to introduce others to linguistics, paying forward the knowledge and support she received as a student here. With some time now on her hands, she plans to brush up on playing the piano and alto saxophone.

Michelle Johnson — Michelle graduated with a B.A. in linguistics with a minor in ELTS with German. During her senior year, she worked closely with professor and chair, Dr. Megha Sundara, as a member of UCLA’s Language Acquisition Lab. Her honors thesis builds upon Dr. Sundara’s previous research on the recognition of morphological suffixes by English-learning infants with a focus on investigating whether there is a difference in the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphemes. She plans to remain in contact with the Language Acquisition Lab during her gap year before eventually pursuing a PhD in linguistics.
Madeleine Kostant-Greeley — Madeleine graduated in June 2023 with a double major in Applied Linguistics and Political Science and a minor in Spanish. Her favorite subject in linguistics is phonology, and she wrote an experimental honors thesis on phonological theory. After applying to law schools this fall, she will spend her gap year teaching in Madrid via a government program.
Ashley Ghodsian — Ashley graduated in Spring 2023 as a UCLA Linguistics Departmental Scholar, with her B.A. in Linguistics and Computer Science and her M.A. in Linguistics. While at UCLA, she worked on independent research projects in syntax and bilingualism for two years and started working on an acquisition and language processing project in her final quarter. She is also a proud member of Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority, Inc., where she has gained much of her community leadership experience in her native Los Angeles. She hopes to tie together her passions for language, problem-solving, and social justice issues in any work she does in the future.

Shalinee Maitra — Shalinee Maitra graduated in December 2022 with a degree in Linguistics and Computer Science. She worked as a research assistant in the Linguistics department for two years, contributing to computational and language acquisition projects. Her senior research project focused on how children might acquire Spanish word order. In addition to linguistics, she was involved with the Bruin Film Society and the Bruin Democrats at UCLA. She is currently back home in Boston and plans to pursue a PhD in linguistics in the near future.Yue Chen — Yue Chen is a recent graduate from UCLA, holding a degree in Linguistics and Psychology. During her two-year adventures as a research assistant in the Language Processing Lab, she actively participated in eye-tracking and sentence-processing projects. Under the guidance of Professor Harris, her senior research project delved into adult comprehension of personal pronouns, utilizing eye-tracking data. Outside the realm of language-related endeavors, Yue finds solace in reading classic literature and embarking on invigorating hiking adventures.
Roxane Martin — Originally from San Diego, Roxane Martin came to UCLA excited to pursue her passion in Linguistics and Computer Science. Supplemented by a minor in Mathematics, Roxane directed her focus on Computational Linguistics research, completing a project on applying Probabilistic Finite State Tree Automata to Long Distance Licensing Structures. After graduation, she plans to pursue a career in Natural Language Processing as a Software Engineer.

Trevor Htoon — Trevor has a wide variety of interests in Linguistics (and even in other fields). His strongest interests are in Historical, Socio-, and Anthropological Linguistics (although he is interested in other domains such as Computational, Applied, etc.). Within these fields, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, and Dialectology are what he enjoys focusing on. His specialties lie mostly within Asian and Indo-European languages (but his degree is just in Linguistics).Guoran Zhang — Guoran Zhang is a Chinese-English bilingual speaker. She is a recent graduate from UCLA who began her journey in the field of Linguistics after her sophomore year, and now is driven to pursue a master’s degree.