Chuchu Li and Candise Lin (HDQM) - Best Student Paper Award, Shanghai, China

Chuchu Li and Candise Lin, both from the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, UMD, attended the Speech Prosody International Conference, which was held in Shanghai, China, May 22-26, 2012. Both of them won the second prize of the “Best Student Paper Award” at this conference. From among 189 papers, 4 were awarded the 2nd prize and 1 was awarded the 1st prize. The title of Chuchu Li’s presentation was “The Activation of Segmental and Tonal information in Lexical Access among Chinese-English Bilingual Speakers”, and the title of Candise Lin’s presentation was “The Role of Lexical Knowledge and Stress Cues in Segmentation in Second Language Learners of English”.

Sol Lago and Wing Yee Chow, winners of the 2012 "Jerrold J. Katz Young Scholar Award".

Sol Lago and Wing Yee Chow, who learned yesterday that they are joint winners of the 2012 "Jerrold J. Katz Young Scholar Award". This is an award for the best paper by a young researcher (student, postdoc, early faculty) at the 2011 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, held at Stanford University in March 2011. The title of their presentation was "Word frequency affects pronouns and antecedents identically: Distributional evidence." They will be presented with the $500 award at the 2012 CUNY conference, which will take place in New York City March 14-16.

The IGERT Program is now accepting applications

We are now accepting applications from students who would like to become full participants in our IGERT program in Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity. To download the guidelines for applicants please visit www.languagescience.umd.edu/resources/igert.php. Note that the program is open to ALL U of Maryland PhD students, regardless of citizenship, departmental home, or faculty advisor. There are currently 35-40 students from 7 departments and programs who regularly participate in activities related to the IGERT program.

Benefits of Participation

For students

-- engage in innovative interdisciplinary training
-- develop research skills not normally available in a single department
-- participate in collaborative research
-- learn to communicate with diverse groups, contribute to scientific
outreach
-- develop leadership skills through student-led initiatives
-- success enhanced by strong peer support network
-- funding for research and travel

For faculty/departments

-- cutting-edge training enhances students' career prospects
-- professional development activities help students' presentation and
communication skills
-- students can bring new expertise to the home department
-- student projects can foster lasting cross-department collaborations
-- access to additional funding for research and travel
-- enhances department visibility and supports recruiting outstanding
students
-- improves department's ability to compete for new grants, gifts, etc.
-- be an integral part of the largest language science community in N
America, a U of MD priority area

Note that although applications are not due until March 28th (Wednesday after Spring Break), we're asking applicants to notify us by March 12th, so that we have a good estimate of how many applications to expect. Please direct inquiries about the program to any participating faculty members, to Colin Phillips (colin@umd.edu), the program director, or to Csilla Kajtar (ckajtar@umd.edu), the program coordinator.


--
Csilla Kajtar
IGERT Program Coordinator | www.languagescience.umd.edu
Linguistics Department | University of Maryland
1413H Marie Mount Hall | College Park, MD 20742

Winter Storm 2012, in Summary

Around 125 students and faculty members participated in Winter Storm 2012 – an intensive 2-week workshop organized by the University of Maryland's language science community in connection with its NSF-IGERT program on Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity. The goal of this year’s Winter Storm was to offer an opportunity for interdisciplinary networking between students and faculty, collaborative team-building, professional development and acquisition of new skills. The 2012 Winter Storm’s program included:

• Introductory lecture by Dr. Colin Phillps, where he addressed the progress of the IGERT program to date and outlined the goals of the program for the near future.
• Daily 2-hour Morning Sessions. This course was meant as an introduction to both programming and statistics using free R software. The teachers – all graduate students from the Linguistics department (Wing Yee Chow, Shevaun Lewis, Annie Gagliardi, Ewan Dunbar) – demonstrated how to format, organize and analyze the data and introduced some tools for data visualization. Anyone interested was welcome, but the course was directed especially to students with no previous knowledge and to intermediate students who would like to improve their expertise with R.
• Advanced R Sessions. Led by Dr. Scott Jackson from CASL, this session targeted advanced users of R, and covered plotting techniques to help the researchers visualize their results in a more effective way for presentation and publication.
• Lunch Talks. We asked faculty members from various UMD departments to give talks on their research in order to help language science students learn more about the different types of language research that is being conducted on campus. The invited speakers included Dr. Peter Carruthers (Philosophy), Dr. Jeff McSwan (Education), Dr. Cathy Doughty (SLA/ CASL), Dr. Alexander Williams (Linguistics/Philosophy), Dr. Min Wang (Human Development), Dr. Elizabeth Redcay (Psychology), Dr. Yi Ting Huang (Hearing and Speech), Dr. Jonathan Beier (Psychology), Dr. Mike Maxwell (CASL). Besides the intellectual pleasure, the attendees were treated to free delicious lunches provided by lunch elves (graduate student volunteers), courtesy of UMIACS.
• Professional Development Series. This Winter Storm session provided the participants with an opportunity to prepare for life after graduation. The three sessions discussed 1) how to obtain a post-doc overseas and what to expect of it (led by Dr. Akira Omaki, Johns Hopkins University), 2) how to secure a job in academia and what it entails (led by Dr. Susanne Jaeggi, UMD) and 3) how to prepare for the job market (led by Dr. Howard Lasnik, UMD). These sessions had a very informal atmosphere where the session leaders shared their experience and advice and the participants had the opportunity to express concerns and ask questions.
• Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Based on the successful outcome of these sessions in previous years, this year’s Winter Storm brought together new research groups with plenty of opportunities for the participants to establish interdisciplinary connections and work on collaborative projects. This year’s SIGs were devoted to diverse topics, such as Eye-tracking (led by Susan Teubner-Rhodes), Language Production (led by Dr. Robert Slevc), Psych reality of grammars (led by Dr. Georges Rey), ACT-R computational model (led by Dan Parker), and Theory of Mind (led by Kate Harrigan).
• Panel Session. A new feature of this year’s Winter Storm was the panel session on “Translation of Research to Practical Applications”. The overall goal of the panel was to raise awareness of connections between basic science and practical applications of language science and to discuss best practices for improving these connections. The talks by the three panelists from a variety of fields - Dave Baggett (UMd graduate, technology entrepreneur, UMd Board of Trustees), Dr. Nan Ratner (Chair, Hearing & Speech Sciences) and Dr. Mike Long (Founder, SLA program) – were very warmly received and engaged the participants in a lively discussion.

The Winter Storm 2012 Organizing Committee— Anna Lukyanchenko (SLA), Susan Teubner-Rhodes (Psychology/NACS), Kate Harrigan (Linguistics), Sol Lago (Linguistics), Candise Lin (Human Development), Ilina Stojanovska (SLA) and Xuan Wang (Philosophy)— would like to thank the many people who participated in this event and helped to make it a success.

For details of the Winter Storm 2012 see the Winter Wiki at

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

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.

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!

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.
 

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.

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.