Congratulations are in order for Michael Wilson, who has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position in Computational Linguistics in the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Reno!

Michael completed his PhD in 2021 with a thesis entitled The Syntactic and Semantic Atoms of the Spray/load Alternation. After leaving UMass, he went to work with Bob Frank at Yale, studying patterns of syntactic acquisition and generalization in neural language models; Following that, Michael taught in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware. At UNR, Michael will contribute to the new BA in Computational Linguistics and continue his research at the interface of linguistic theory, computational linguistics, and language acquisition and processing.

At this year’s Human Sentence Processing conference, Maayan Keshev was awarded the Gibson/Fedorenko Young Scholar Award for work presented at the 2024 HSP conference. Maayan’s talk was titled ‘A transient binding model of interference in sentence processing‘ (along with Mandy Cartner, Aya Meltzer-Asscher, and Brian Dillon).

The Gibson/Fedorenko Young Scholar Award is meant to honor young scholars who deliver outstanding work in sentence processing at the HSP conference since 2022, continuing a tradition of the Jerrold J. Katz Young Scholar Award that was given to outstanding young scholars at the HSP (formerly CUNY) conference in honor and loving memory of Jerry Katz. As part of the Gibson/Fedorenko award, two young scholars are awarded $1000.

Here is Maayan receiving her award from Ted Gibson!

The 38th annual conference on Human Sentence Processing took place in College Park, MD at the University of Maryland on March 27-29. UMass Scholars, past and present, were well represented in the program!

There were a number of platform presentations with UMass scholars:

• Shota Momma, Norvin Richards, and Victor Ferreira – Speakers encode silent structures: evidence from complementizer priming in English.
• Caroline Andrews, Sebastian Sauppe, Roberto Zariquiey, and Balthasar Bickel – Building a Cross-Linguistic Typology of Sentence Planning from Case Alignment
• Fernanda Ferreira, Julie Bannon, Madison Barker, Beverly Cotter, Casey Felton, Barbora Hlachova, and Adrian Zhou – Rethinking Prosodic Phrasing

Including a special demo:

• Lauren Salig, Erika Exton, Craig Thorburn, Alex Krauska – Conveying psycholinguistic concepts to general audiences: An interactive, problem-solving approach

There are many poster presentations from UMass Scholars as well:

• Yuhui Huang, Anthony Yacovone, and Jesse Snedeker – Switching meanings and forms: An ERP study on multilingual language processing in Mandarin-English bilinguals
• Beverly Cotter, Alberto Falcon, and Fernanda Ferreira – Flexibility in Bilingual Grammar: Judgments and Production of Noun-Adjective Sequences in Spanish-English Speakers
• Eva Neu, Maayan Keshev, and Brian Dillon – Modeling agreement attraction effects in vector space
• Jane Li and Grusha Prasad – Modeling morphological production with an algorithmically specified InflACT-R
• Satoru Ozaki and Shota Momma – Evaluating LLMs for abstract linguistic generalization using English parasitic gaps
• Briony Waite, Tatyana Levari, Anthony Yacovone, and Jesse Snedeker – Lexical access during naturalistic listening in middle childhood and early adolescence
• Thomas Hansen, Anthony Yacovone, Ivi Fung, and Gina Kuperberg – Changing the narrative: ERP markers of building and updating situation models during deep naturalistic comprehension
• Ashlyn Winship, Zander Lynch, John R. Starr, Yifan Wu, Lucas Li, and Marten van Schijndel – Experimentally extracting implicit instruments
• Özge Bakay, Faruk Akkuș, and Brian Dillon – Hierarchical relations in memory retrieval: Evidence from a local anaphor in Turkish
• Anzi Wang, Carolyn Anderson, and Grusha Prasad – To know what you might say, I will probably need to know the event type
• Mara Breen and Katerina Drakoulaki – Prosodic fluency in productions of The Cat in the Hat predicts reading comprehension skill in 6-10-year-olds
• Thomas Morton, Amber Jiang, and Victor Ferreira – Reaching for the unknown: sentence planning under message uncertainty and expectation violation
• Katerina Drakoulaki and Mara Breen – From lab to neighborhood: enhancing child language research through community-based collaborations
• Zander Lynch and Helena Aparicio – Failing Alternatives Lower the Acceptability of Definite Descriptions
• Adrian Zhou, Matthew Lowder and Fernanda Ferreira – Camping Tigers, Hiking Dragons: Dangling Modifiers Do Not Add Processing Difficulty
• Mandy Cartner, Brian Dillon, Aya Meltzer-Asscher, and Maayan Keshev – Rational inference does not predict agreement errors: Gender vs number attraction in Hebrew comprehension
• Suet-Ying Lam and Satoru Ozaki – Investigating the source of the passive ellipsis clause penalty in VP ellipsis
• Barbora Hlachova and Fernanda Ferreira – Garden-path dead-ends contextualized
• Beverly Cotter and Fernanda Ferreira – A Direct Comparison of RC and PP Attachment Preferences
• Shayne Sloggett and Quynh Chieu – Investigating island constraints in Vietnamese

On August 14th, Erika Mayer successfully defended her dissertation entitled “The online processing of even’s likelihood presupposition.” In her thesis, Erika used a range of psycholinguistic methods to investigate the real-time processing of the likelihood presupposition associated with even. Erika’s results showed that, unlike some other semantic or discourse operators, comprehenders generally do not use the presence of even to modulate lexical expectations about how the sentence is likely to unfold. Her results offer interesting insights into what type of an operator even may be, as well as the types of information that comprehenders can incrementally use in sentence comprehension. Erika’s committee consisted of Brian Dillon (chair), Vincent Homer, and Adrian Staub.

(Photo cred: Vincent Homer)

Congratulations, Erika!

Congratulations are in order for Maayan Keshev, who has been awarded a prestigious Azrieli Fellowhip!

Maayan has been awarded the Azrieli Early Career Faculty Fellowship to lead  research on the role of abstract grammatical knowledge and frequency in predictive processing. The fellowship will come into effect as she will take her new faculty position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in February 2024. The competitive Azrieli Early Career Faculty Fellowship aims to promote research leadership in Israel across all fields of study. The Azrieli Foundation provides selected outstanding scholars with research funding, advances their career development, as well as covers costs associated with the fellows’ remuneration at their home institution.

Congratulations Maayan!

Maayan Keshev has accepted a position as a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Linguistics at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Maayan will begin as a Professor and start up her psycholinguistics lab at HUJI starting in January 2024. Congratulations to Maayan, and to HUJI Linguistics!

The Human Sentence Processing conference took place Thursday March 9th to Saturday March 11th at the University of Pittsburgh.

UMass psycholinguists past and present were well represented! In fact, this year’s conference was co-organized by UMass alumnus Mike Dikey (Ph.D. 2000), along with Tessa Warren, Scott Fraundorf, Natasha Tokowicz, and Seth Wiener.

In addition:

Shota Momma gave a talk entitled “Producing unbounded dependencies: Shota Momma evidence from structural priming of that“

Justin Guesser, Arielle Borovsky, Patricia Deevy, Claney Outzen and Laurence Leonard gave a talk entitled “Knowledge and processing affect online prediction in developmental language disorder”

Kuan-Jung Huang and Brian Dillon gave a talked entitled “A large, rare processing cost underlies garden path effects: An RT distribution approach”

Ozge Bakay, Jon Burnsky, Maayan Keshev, Mariam Asatryan, Kyle Johnson and Brian Dillon gave a poster entitled “Predicting disjoint reference: offline and online evidence”

Mandy Cartner and Maayan Keshev gave a poster entitled “Optional resumption is used to overcome local ambiguity in Hebrew”

Shota Momma gave a poster entitled “Filler-gap dependencies alter compositional units in sentence production”

Maayan Keshev, Matt Wagers and Brian Dillon gave a poster entitled “The role of prediction in retrieval interference: The case of reflexive attraction”

Mandy Cartner, Ivy Sichel, Maziar Toosarvandani and Matt Wagers gave a poster entitled “Predictive parsing as a source for resumptive pronoun preference in Hebrew”

Justin Kueser, Patricia Deevy, Arielle Borovsky, Michelle Indarjit, Mine Muezzinoglu, Claney Outzen and Laurence Leonard gave a poster entitled “Vocabulary supports event probability cues in developmental language disorder”

Briony Waite, Anthony Yacovone and Jesse Snedeker gave a poster entitled “Children make robust lexical predictions in a naturalistic context”

Fengyue Zhao, Brian Dillon and Ming Xiang gave a poster entitled “Probabilistic Listener: A Case of Reflexive ziji “self” Ambiguity Resolution in Mandarin”

Linh Pham, Thuy Bui, Alexander Goebel and Elsi Kaiser gave a poster entitled “Anaphora resolution in Vietnamese: On the effects of person feature constraints on the interpretation of reflexive ‘mình’”

Morwenna Hoeks, Amanda Rysling and Maziar Toosarvandani gave a poster entitled “Integrating contextual information in on-line alternative set construction”

Kelsey Sasaki, Pranav Anand and Amanda Rysling gave a poster entitled “Animacy and event structure modulate long- distance pronominal anaphora in discourse”

Heeju Hwang and Suet Ying Lam gave a poster entitled “The influence of action continuity on reference form in Mandarin and English”

Lalitha Balachandran, Morwenna Hoeks, Nicholas Van Handel and Amanda Rysling gave a poster entitled “Top-down expectations vs. bottom-up information in prosodic memory”

Eszter Ronai and Alexander Goebel gave a poster entitled “Intonation affects rate of scalar inferences: production and perception data from English”

Tyler Knowlton and Florian Schwarz gave a poster entitled “”Every” provides an implicit comparison class when “each” does not”

5th year Ph.D. student Anissa Neal gave not one but two invited talks this week. On Tuesday November 29th she gave an invited talk entitled, Speaker Identity and Syntactic Expectations: A proposed study on African American Language, at Harvard University’s Language and Cognition research group, and on Friday 12/2 she gave an invited colloquium with the same title at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky. In her talk, she discussed her computational and experimental work on processing subject contact relative clauses in African American Language. Congratulations Anissa!

Suet Ying Lam (Ph.D. student) published work with Heeju Hwang (University of Hong Kong) in Cognitive Science. Their paper may be accessed here:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cogs.13190

The title of Suet Ying’s paper is ‘How Does Topicality Affect the Choice of Referential Form? Evidence From Mandarin.’ In it, she investigates the relationship between topicality and predictability, and how these factors influence the choice between null and overt pronouns in Mandarin Chinese. Congratulations, Suet Ying!

Rong Yin (PhD, 2021) has accepted a position as a Computational Linguist at Lymba Corporation starting September 2022. There, she will work on the development of ontologies for use with various kinds of computational language models. Congratulations Rong Yin, we’re proud of you!