Author Archives: Kristine Yu

Yu presents at Tsing Hua Workshop on Prosodic and Metrical Phonology at close of National Chiao Tung University Taiwan sabbatical

Program for National Tsing Hua University Workshop on Prosodic and Metrical Phonology, June 24, 2020, Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Faculty member Kristine Yu presented at the Tsinghua University Workshop on Prosodic and Metrical Phonology 2020 on June 24, 2020 to help kick off the 35th anniversary celebration of the founding of the linguistics program at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Due to COVID-19, this was perhaps the first in-person linguistics workshop/conference in the region in many months.

Yu has been on sabbatical for Spring 2020 as a visiting scholar at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at neighboring National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) since the end of January 2020, sponsored by Sang-Im Lee-Kim via a grant from the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST, Taiwan equivalent of National Science foundation in US). She has formed a number of new collaborations:

  • With Sang-Im Lee-Kim (NCTU): work on perception of Mandarin tones produced by Korean L2 learners of Mandarin
  • With Ho-hsien Pan (NCTU) and Grace Kuo (National Taiwan University): corpus work on syntax-prosody interface issues in Taiwanese Southern Min tone sandhi
  • With Yu-An Lu (NCTU): work on the phonetics of Formosan languages for the Handbook of Formosan Languages
  • More generally, a new consortium of scholars working on the phonetics and phonology of Formosan languages, including Chenhao Chiu (National Taiwan University), Hui-Chuang Huang (Academia Sinica), Grace Kuo (National Taiwan University), Siusuat Lau (National Tsing Hua University), and Yu-An Lu (NCTU)
NCTU colleagues: Yu-An Lu, Sang-Im Lee-Kim, Carlos Gussenhoven, Ho-hsien Pan

She also participated in a graduate seminar on prosody offered by visiting scholar Carlos Gussenhoven, which provided inspiration for the talk presented at the Tsing Hua workshop, and participated in various ways in departmental life, including offering a tutorial on Generalized Additive Mixed Models as part of the NCTU Phon Brown Bag series.

GAMMs tutorial at NCTU, June 2020.

Yu in Taiwan for Spring 2020 sabbatical

Faculty member Kristine Yu will be on sabbatical and conducting research supported by a grant from Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology during the Spring 2020 semester. She’ll be hosted by and collaborating with faculty at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu, including Sang-Im Lee-Kim (Lecturer at UMass, 2014-2015) and Ho-hsien Pan.

UMass at RecPhon 2019

Many UMass folks past and present were at RecPhon 2019: Recursivity
in phonology below and above the word, 21-22 November 2019, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra. A number of former UMass visitors were co-organizers: Eulàlia Bonet, Joan Mascaró, Francesc Torres-Tamarit.

Invited speakers and UMass alumni Junko Ito and Armin Mester presented Recursivity in phonology below the word, while invited speaker and UMass alumna Emily Elfner presented Match Theory and Recursion below and above the word: Evidence from Tlingit. Faculty member Kristine Yu presented Computational perspectives on phonological constituency and recursion and graduate student Leland Kusmer presented Minimal prosodic recursion in Khoekhoegowab. Former visitor Gorka Elordieta presented joint work with emeritus faculty member Lisa Selkirk: Phrasing unaccented words in a recursive prosodic structure in Basque.

UMass folks at RecPhon 2019

Eulàlia Bonet, Armin Mester, Emily Elfner, Junko Ito, Kristine Yu, Leland Kusmer, Gorka Elordieta, Joan Mascaró

UMass folks at RecPhon 2019

Francesc Torres-Tamarit, Emily Elfner, Junko Ito, Armin Mester, Kristine Yu, Leland Kusmer, Gorka Elordieta

UMass at NWAV 48

UMass linguistics has been at NWAV 48 at the University of Oregon this weekend!

Faculty members Lisa Green, Kristine Yu, grad students Ayana Whitmal, Anissa Neal, and Deniz Özy?ld?z, and collaborator Alejna Brugos from Boston University presented
a talk: The prosody and meaning of BIN constructions in African American English.

Our Fulbright scholar Kamil Kazmierski from Adam Mickiewicz University presented two posters: one with his collaborator Michaela Hejná from Aarhus University on preaspiration in American English, as well as another one with his university colleague Krzysztof Urbanek on Variability in word-final /r/-vocalization in Providence: Evidence from Crimetown.

Here’s Kamil and his collaborator Michaela.

Our recent PhD recipient Tracy Conner, currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at UC Santa Barbara, co-organized A workshop for inclusion in sociocultural linguistics with her UC Santa Barbara colleagues.

And alum Elliot Moreton (Professor, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) gave a talk on Abstract factors in English diphthong raising in a Mississippi dialect.

Hauser to University of Minnesota

As we announced back in May, Ivy Hauser defended her dissertation Effects of phonological contrast on within-category phonetic variation on May 9th – here she is with the “defense fish” and her title page!

Ivy Hauser after successful dissertation defense, May 2019

Ivy Hauser after successful dissertation defense, May 2019

Now she’s a Contract Assistant Professor at the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota.

Ivy Hauser at University of Minnesota

Ivy Hauser at University of Minnesota

Congratulations Ivy!

Memorial gathering for Russ Schuh at UCLA

I flew over to UCLA to attend a memorial gathering for Russ Schuh on March 10, 2017. Kyle Johnson was in attendance as well. Russ was a very important mentor to me in grad school at UCLA, and I also played in the Balkan Ensemble with him for a few years. Remembrances and the program for the memorial (scroll down to the bottom) can be found here.

You can listen to a recording of Three Songs from Pirin that we performed to open the memorial here.

LSA Launches Student Research Spotlight

Students, publicize your published work at LSA’s Student Research Spotlight!

From the LSA:

As part of the LSA’s ongoing efforts to increase the visibility of LSA members and their work, The Society is launching a new “Student Research Spotlight” feature that will highlight recent journal publications by our student members. Our goals for this feature are twofold:

To recognize the accomplishments made by LSA Student Members who have recently published their work in peer-reviewed journals, and

To promote the work of our student members to the wider community of LSA members and those interested in language, which we hope will result in broader networking opportunities for our student members, whose careers as linguists are coming into their own

Five Colleges Prosody Group Meeting Tuesday 10/11

The Five Colleges Prosody Group, which is coordinated by Mara Breen and Heather Pon-Barry of Mount Holyoke, Meghan Armstrong-Abrami and Kristine Yu of UMass Amherst, will have its first meeting of the year on Tuesday, 10/11 11:30am-1:00pm in N400.

Please come and enjoy lunch with us (lunch will be provided), and hear from Matt Frelinger about plans for experimental work in implicit prosody and (maybe?) from Wilmar Lopez Barrios about his MA work on focus in Colombian Spanish.