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.