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.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
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
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.
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!
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!
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!
Monday, October 25, 2010
33rd Second Language Research Forum at UMD
In October, the students from the Second Language Acquisition Program hosted the 33rd Second Language Research Forum, a major annual international conference in the field of SLA. It started with a two-hour presentation by Dr. Colin Phillips, 
who provided an overview of recent developments in experimental and computational tools for language science, with a focus on special considerations for SLA research. The talk was followed by seven concurrent free tutorial workshops, all filled to capacity:
1. Reaction Time Studies using DMDX (Nan Jiang)
2. E-Prime Workshop for Psycholinguistics in SLA (Annie Tremblay, Sunyoung Lee-Ellis, Anna Lukyanchenko)
3. Eye-Tracking for Language using Eyelink and ASL Remote Eye Trackers (Jared Novick, Susan Teubner-Rhodes, Alan Mishler, Shayne Sloggett)
4. Neurolinguistics using Electroencephalography (EEG) and Magnetoencephalography (MEG) (Colin Phillips, Wing-Yee Chow, Shannon Barrios)
5. New Considerations for Studies of Memory & Language (Brian Dillon, Erika Hussey)
6. Working with Children (Candise Chen, Min Wang)
7. Analysis and Visualization using R (Pedro Alcocer, Ewan Dunbar)
The conference proper started with the opening plenary by Dr. Michael Long (University of Maryland), who presented an embryonic theory of instructed adult SLA. The first day of the conference was celebrated with a free Welcome Reception at Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center, where attendees were treated to a choice of light meals and beverages. The second day of the conference saw a full day of colloquia, papers, posters, a workshop on how to get published in SLA, and another plenary talk on the topic of the L2 ultimate attainment given by Dr. Kenneth Hyltenstam (Stockholm University). In the evening, many SLRF attendees used the opportunity to socialize and network at the dinner reception, complete with a student jazz trio [provided by the UMD School of Music]. The remaining two days of the conference were filled with four colloquia, papers, posters, and two more plenary talks by Dr. William O'Grady (University of Hawaii) on language acquisition without an acquisition device, and Dr. Judith Kroll (Pennsylvania State University) on the consequences of bilingualism for cognition.
Overall, we think SLRF 2010 was a big success. The conference provided a venue for 424 faculty members and graduate students to meet, present their work, exchange and develop their research ideas. It featured 4 plenary talks, 6 colloquia, 2 workshops, 109 papers and 39 posters! Several seasoned SLRFers said this was the best SLRF they had ever attended, due mostly to the high quality of the presentations and the well-executed organization. Much of the success of the conference was due to two factors, generous financial support and a dedicated group of hard-working student organizers and volunteers. The faculty members and the Ph.D. students from the SLA Program would like to express their sincere thanks to those students and volunteers who contributed to the organization of the conference as well as to the conference sponsors: the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (SLLC), The College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU), the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC), the Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL), the NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) Program, and UMD’s Division of Research.
who provided an overview of recent developments in experimental and computational tools for language science, with a focus on special considerations for SLA research. The talk was followed by seven concurrent free tutorial workshops, all filled to capacity:1. Reaction Time Studies using DMDX (Nan Jiang)
2. E-Prime Workshop for Psycholinguistics in SLA (Annie Tremblay, Sunyoung Lee-Ellis, Anna Lukyanchenko)
3. Eye-Tracking for Language using Eyelink and ASL Remote Eye Trackers (Jared Novick, Susan Teubner-Rhodes, Alan Mishler, Shayne Sloggett)
4. Neurolinguistics using Electroencephalography (EEG) and Magnetoencephalography (MEG) (Colin Phillips, Wing-Yee Chow, Shannon Barrios)
5. New Considerations for Studies of Memory & Language (Brian Dillon, Erika Hussey)
6. Working with Children (Candise Chen, Min Wang)
7. Analysis and Visualization using R (Pedro Alcocer, Ewan Dunbar)
The conference proper started with the opening plenary by Dr. Michael Long (University of Maryland), who presented an embryonic theory of instructed adult SLA. The first day of the conference was celebrated with a free Welcome Reception at Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center, where attendees were treated to a choice of light meals and beverages. The second day of the conference saw a full day of colloquia, papers, posters, a workshop on how to get published in SLA, and another plenary talk on the topic of the L2 ultimate attainment given by Dr. Kenneth Hyltenstam (Stockholm University). In the evening, many SLRF attendees used the opportunity to socialize and network at the dinner reception, complete with a student jazz trio [provided by the UMD School of Music]. The remaining two days of the conference were filled with four colloquia, papers, posters, and two more plenary talks by Dr. William O'Grady (University of Hawaii) on language acquisition without an acquisition device, and Dr. Judith Kroll (Pennsylvania State University) on the consequences of bilingualism for cognition.
Overall, we think SLRF 2010 was a big success. The conference provided a venue for 424 faculty members and graduate students to meet, present their work, exchange and develop their research ideas. It featured 4 plenary talks, 6 colloquia, 2 workshops, 109 papers and 39 posters! Several seasoned SLRFers said this was the best SLRF they had ever attended, due mostly to the high quality of the presentations and the well-executed organization. Much of the success of the conference was due to two factors, generous financial support and a dedicated group of hard-working student organizers and volunteers. The faculty members and the Ph.D. students from the SLA Program would like to express their sincere thanks to those students and volunteers who contributed to the organization of the conference as well as to the conference sponsors: the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (SLLC), The College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU), the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC), the Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL), the NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) Program, and UMD’s Division of Research.
New Language Science Faculty: Hal Daume III, CS & LING
Hal Daume III is a new Assistant Professor in Computer Science, with a joint appointment in Linguistics. He is primarily interested in the interface between natural language processing, computational linguistics and machine learning. 
His work in statistical modeling spans multiple aspects of language processing, including structured prediction, Bayesian methods, domain adaptation, and linguistic typology. Recently, he has been particularly interested in methods that involve processing many (100+) languages simultaneously, using linguistic insights (particularly from typology) to constrain the space of solutions that learning algorithms try to explore. He has latent interests in document summarization, discourse theory and language evolution.
His work in statistical modeling spans multiple aspects of language processing, including structured prediction, Bayesian methods, domain adaptation, and linguistic typology. Recently, he has been particularly interested in methods that involve processing many (100+) languages simultaneously, using linguistic insights (particularly from typology) to constrain the space of solutions that learning algorithms try to explore. He has latent interests in document summarization, discourse theory and language evolution.
Friday, October 1, 2010
HESP to host CLAN Training Workshop
On October 14, Nan Ratner, Chair of the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, will host a workshop on new methods that allow greatly improved efficiency in transcribing and analyzing audio and video data. The workshop will focus on recently developed enhancements to the CLAN tools offered by CHILDES, the Child Language Data Exchange system (see here for more information: http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/). CLAN is a program released by CHILDES used in multimedia data organization and analysis.
Space is limited for the October workshop, due to the already high level of interest that it has generated, but you should feel free to contact Nan Ratner at nratner@hesp.umd.edu if you are interested. The workshop will run from 4-6pm on Thursday October 14th in the Hearing & Speech Sciences graduate classroom (Lefrak 0135), and will guide participants through hands-on exercises. As an added bonus, Nan will bring wine and cheese, and additional donations of soda or snacks are welcomed.
Space is limited for the October workshop, due to the already high level of interest that it has generated, but you should feel free to contact Nan Ratner at nratner@hesp.umd.edu if you are interested. The workshop will run from 4-6pm on Thursday October 14th in the Hearing & Speech Sciences graduate classroom (Lefrak 0135), and will guide participants through hands-on exercises. As an added bonus, Nan will bring wine and cheese, and additional donations of soda or snacks are welcomed.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Amy Weinberg takes position as deputy executive director at CASL
Amy Weinberg, Professor with joint appointments in the Department of Linguistics, the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), and the Department of Computer Science, was named as the new deputy executive director of the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL). Dr. Weinberg played a key role in the founding of CASL in 2003 where she served as Area Director for Technical Use from 2004-2007. She returns to CASL with an even greater wealth of experience in Language Science research, including directing efforts for the Language Cognition and Culture Center as part of her appointment in the UMD Vice President for Research's office since 2007, working as PI on the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins from 2007-2010, and serving as co-PI for our own IGERT program on the Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity since 2008. See also: http://www.casl.umd.edu/node/1360.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Sunyoung Lee-Ellis (SLA) awarded $3000 for IGERT poster presentation
At this year’s NSF-IGERT annual meeting (May 24-25, Washington DC) Sunyoung Lee-Ellis (SLA) was awarded $3000 for her poster presentation on "Why bilinguals forget or not forget what their parents told them." The poster was based on joint research studies with Shannon Hoerner (LING) and several language science faculty. The award is meant to support Sunyoung's ongoing research in the US and Korea on the linguistic and perceptual abilities of heritage language speakers.
This year’s IGERT poster competition featured one student representative from each of the roughly 130 currently active IGERT programs, spanning across areas such as ecology, nanoscience, robotics, fuel cell technology, and applied mathematics. In her presentation, Sunyoung highlighted the parts of her research that the general public could relate to and conveyed why her research should be of interest to them.
The IGERT meeting also offered Sunyoung the opportunity present to engineering students the wikis that the UMD-IGERT language science students created to enhance interdisciplinary communication. She also took part in a session on how to present your work in a 60-second 'elevator speech', and learned about emerging opportunities for digital science and science journalism. The exercise was meant to encourage students to engage in sharing research and ideas with scholars of other disciplines.
This year’s IGERT poster competition featured one student representative from each of the roughly 130 currently active IGERT programs, spanning across areas such as ecology, nanoscience, robotics, fuel cell technology, and applied mathematics. In her presentation, Sunyoung highlighted the parts of her research that the general public could relate to and conveyed why her research should be of interest to them.
The IGERT meeting also offered Sunyoung the opportunity present to engineering students the wikis that the UMD-IGERT language science students created to enhance interdisciplinary communication. She also took part in a session on how to present your work in a 60-second 'elevator speech', and learned about emerging opportunities for digital science and science journalism. The exercise was meant to encourage students to engage in sharing research and ideas with scholars of other disciplines.
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