Tuesday, November 8, 2011

HESP Happy Hour Tool Kit Series

The Happy Hour Tool Kit Series continues this semester with two workshops of broad interest for language science students. Please save the dates! Refreshments will be provided and all graduate students and faculty are cordially invited. If you would like to attend, please sign up at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDZLaVd3MFRuUDE4SFVuMXhpbjNqbnc6MQ. If you have any questions regarding these workshop, feel free to email thwu@umd.edu.

11/28 (Monday) 4:30-6:30pm
Location: Woods1130
Topic: “Basic PRAAT - Sound editing software” by Matt Winn (HESP).

12/09 (Friday) 3-5pm
Location: Woods1130
Topic: "Overview of Standardized Language Assessment Tools" by Dr. Nan Bernstein Ratner (HESP)

Please visit the following wiki page for more information on these 2 events, as well as other future ones:
(http://languagescience.umd.edu/wiki/HESP%20tool-kit%20series).

In order to have a more productive session, we recommend that you download the necessary
software/materials ahead of time, and bring your laptop to the session.
The software that we’ll be using is completely FREE and you can find the link for downloading on the wiki page under “click for more info.”

Thank you for your interest and we hope to see you at the workshops!

Te-Hsin Wu
Sarah Jane McCruden
Matt Winn
Giovanna Morini
Nan Bernstein Ratner

Thursday, September 22, 2011

VL2 workshop on EEG and MEG by Wing Yee Chow and Sol Lago

Wing Yee Chow and Sol Lago recently taught a two-hour workshop on EEG and MEG to a group of fourteen students in the NSF-funded Visual Language and Learning (VL2) Science of Learning Center hosted at Gallaudet University. The students came from a number universities: Gallaudet, UC Davis, Boston University, U Toronto, U New Mexico, UT Austin, Rochester, Georgia Tech, and UI Urbana-Champaign.

Friday, September 2, 2011

Language Science Day on Sept 16, 2011 - Register Now!

Language Science Day is an annual student-run event celebrating language science and including all the relevant approaches to the study of language such as cognitive, computational, engineering, clinical, theoretical, philosophical, biological, and educational. In 2010 the event brought together over 120 students, researchers and faculty doubling the size of the active language science community at UMd.

This year the LSD student committee planned an afternoon of events starting with a networking lunch social that will start at noon in the Atrium room of the Adele Stamp Union. The lunch will be followed by a research fair, and a series of short presentations on language science-related opportunities for collaboration between all interested researchers on the UMD campus.

For a detailed schedule and description of event and to register your participation please visit theLanguage Science Day 2011 link.

We are looking forward to seeing you there!

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

New Faculty Profile: Yi Ting Huang, Hearing & Speech Sciences

Yi Ting Huang is a new Assistant Professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences.  She received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at Harvard University in 2009 and has spent the last couple of years as a post-doctoral fellow in Cognitive Psychology at the University of North Carolina. 

Yi Ting is interested nearly all things language.  Her primary expertise is in development and the bulk of her work focuses on how young language learners acquire the ability to coordinate linguistic representations during real-time comprehension.   She explores this question by using eye-tracking methods to examine how the moment-to-moment changes that occur during processing influence the year-to-year changes that emerge during development.  She has applied this approach to study a variety of topics including word recognition, grammatical role assignments, and the semantics-pragmatics interface (scalar implicatures, scalar adjectives, discourse representations).   Other questions that Yi Ting enjoys thinking about include the relationship between language and concepts, comprehension and production, and speech and reading.
 

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Dr. Bill Idsardi's research featured in Science Magazine

Dr. Bill Idsardi's research with Jeffrey Heinz (Univ. of Delaware) on whether humans learn the sentence and sound patterns of natural languages through distinct learning mechanisms appears in the article "Sentence and Word Complexity" in Science Magazine (July 15, 2011). Follow the link to read the article Science (July 15, 2011) to read the article.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Alex Drummond to post doc at Durham University, UK

Alex Drummond, LING and IGERT student, is beginning a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University (England). He will be working on a project with Professor Wolfram Hinzen, supported by UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Shevaun Lewis (LING) Wins ARHU Service Award

Congratulations to Shevaun Lewis, who has won the College of Arts and Humanities Service award in the category of Graduate Student, for all of the work she has done above and beyond the call of duty for the linguistics department, for the language acquisition lab, and for the executive committee of the "Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity" IGERT program.

Theo $1,000 award will be presented to Shevaun at the College Convocation on September 13, 2011 at 3:30pm at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. In addition, the recipients will receive personal engraved plaques and their names will be added to a College plaque on display in the Dean’s office.

Erika Hussey (PSYC/NACS) awarded $1000 for IGERT poster presentation

This year’s NSF-IGERT fellow poster competition (May 3-6, 2011) was for the first time held online at www.igert.org. The competition featured 135 presenters that were nominated through their individual IGERT programs. The posters were judged by a committee of faculty who volunteered their time for the job. Erika’s work on “How Exercising (Your Brain) Improves Language Use” was selected among the 24 finalist posters, and she was invited to the NSF headquarters on May 25 for the final phase of the poster competition, which included a career advancement day.

Erika’s research is centered on investigating the role of cognitive control for language processing and examines how cognitive control training generalizes to measures of language processing. Her present study was the first to demonstrate that cognitive control training may transfer to untrained language measures, suggesting that general-purpose cognitive control is a common mechanism that reinterpretation abilities also rely on. These findings have important implications for patient populations with cognitive impairments that affect language skills. Her work may also help to inform ways of determining how to offset conditions when cognitive control is depleted, like cases of cognitive-fatigue, stress, and performance-pressure.

Erika’s Poster can be viewed at: http://www.igert.org/posters2011/posters/38
The 24 finalist works can also be seen at: http://www.igert.org/posters2011/posters#/finalists/id=finalists

Monday, April 11, 2011

NSF-GRFP grant awarded to Dustin Chacon, LING

Dustin Chacón, a first year student, Flagship fellow and Beinecke scholar in the Linguistics department at UMd, has been recently awarded a prestigious NSF-GRFP grant. The grant will be covering his stipend, tuition costs, and cover a bit of funding for travel costs for 3 years.

The project that Colin Phillips and he proposed was to see whether the robustness of applying grammatical coreference
constraints in parsing that have been observed in English are due to the properties of those constraints or whether they are due to the way that word order and memory mechanisms interact. He will test this by looking at correlative clause constructions in Hindi in which the same coreference constraints exist, though the relevant phrases come in reverse linear order with respect to their English counterparts.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

HESP Happy Hour Tool-Kit Series

The Department of Hearing & Speech Sciences is happy to announce a new series of seminars and workshops designed to spread expertise in software and research applications commonly used in language-related fields. The point of these sessions will be to spur the increased use of software which can increase the productivity of language researchers, as well as foster collaborations between scholars who stand to benefit from the mutual sharing of expertise. All workshops are open to UMD graduate students and faculty, and refreshments will be provided.

Topics will include things like:

CHAT/CLAN for language transcript analysis
PRAAT
Statistical websites and packets
Photoshop & Virtual Dub

The first workshop will be “Using CLAN: Routines & Interfaces” taking place on Tuesday (4/12) from 4-6pm in room 0135 in Lefrak Hall. Refreshments will be provided and all graduate students and faculty are cordially invited. Please send a reply to gmorini@umd.edu to confirm your attendance.

Visit the following wiki page for more information on this and other future events (http://languagescience.umd.edu/wiki/HESP%20tool-kit%20series). While it is not a requirement, we recommend that you download the necessary software ahead of time, and bring your laptop to the session. The software that we’ll be using is completely FREE and you can find the link for downloading on the wiki page under “click for more info”.

Thank you for your interest and we hope to see you on April 12th!

IGERT Student wins AAAS Poster Competition

A student poster presented by Yakov Kronrod (Linguistics), featuring work by Yakov, Chang Hu (CS), Olivia Buzek (CS and Linguistics undergrad), and Alexander J. Quinn (CS), has been named the winning poster in the Math, Technology, and Engineering category at the 2011 American Association for the Advancement of Science, (AAAS) Student Poster Competition. The AAAS is an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world. In addition to organizing membership activities, AAAS publishes the journal Science.

The poster, entitled Using Monolingual Crowds to Improve Translation, reported on work done in the context of a project on crowdsourcing and translation led by Ben Bederson and Philip Resnik, which is supported by NSF and a Google Research Award. The students will be recognized in a spring issue of Science and on the Annual Meeting web site for AAAS, in addition to receiving a cash prize and a subscription to Science.

Particular recognition goes to Yakov for his leadership in creating and presenting the poster, and to all four students for the excellent work represented here and in the project as a whole. Congratulations on this well deserved recognition!