This Summer and Fall 2024, many graduate students from the UIUC Linguistics department presented their research at conferences near and far. Let’s take the time to congratulate each of them for their dedication to their work and their excellent representation of our department!
At the beginning of the summer term, MATESL student Raihan Rahman presented the talk “From Mundane to Memorable: 5 Ways to Contextualize an ESL Topic Using Edvibe.com” as well as the talk “Code-Free Craft: Empowering Educators to Create Language Learning Games with Construct 3” at the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) in Pittsburgh, PA.
This summer also featured PhD student Saman Jamshidi’s talk “From Profanity to Revolution: Rechronotopization of Vulgar Language in Iran’s Protests” at Sociolinguistics Symposium 25, which took place in Perth, Western Australia.
In October, PhD student Paul de Nijs presented a talk titled “Variable Clitic Placement in Monolingual and Bilingual Spanish-Speaking Adolescents” at the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium held at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
At the 25th MwALT (Midwest Association of Language Testers) Conference in Pittsburgh, PA, Huiying Cai (PhD Student), Dr. Ping-Lin Chuang (PhD), Yulin Pan (PhD Student) and Mingyue Huo (PhD Student) presented their work “A feature-based machine learning approach to understanding item difficulty in L2 listening comprehension tests”.
Additionally, PhD Student Isela Silvera traveled to the 31st Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference held in Melbourne, Australia to present her poster “Comprehension and production (mis)alignment: Experimental evidence from Korean reflexives”.
Also in October, UIUC hosted MidPhon 29, which featured several showcases from UIUC researchers. Linguistics PhD student Ryan Corrigan presented his poster ”English Liquid Error Detection of Japanese Speakers using Dynamic Time Warping with Open Boundary Conditions.” And PhD student Joshua Dees presented the talk “A CBP account of mismatches in stress assignment and palatal harmony across Turkic.”
In November, Joshua also presented the poster “The grammaticalization of Turkic comitative(s): Mismatches in harmony and stress” at the Annual Meeting of Phonology held at Rutgers in New Jersey.
Josh Dees presenting his talk at MidPhon 29
Next, PhD Student Walther Glodstaf presented his talk “Evidence for the Assumption that Changes in Activation Underlie in L1-Attrition” at High Desert Linguistics Society 16 which took place at the University of New Mexico.
This year, recent PhD graduate Dr.Aylin Coşkun Kunduz presented two posters featuring her work alongside advisor Dr. Silvina Montrul. The posters were entitled “Flexibility of complex syntax after puberty: The case of Turkish-American returnees” -presented at the Fifteenth Heritage Language Research Institute at the University of California in June – and “Inflectional morphology in Turkish heritage speakers and Turkish-American returnees” presented at the 49th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development in November.
Aylin presenting her poster with Dr. Montrul at BUCLD
Also at BUCLD, Dr. Tania Ionin presented the talk “Plurality in L2-English production”, coauthored by Linguistics PhD students Amy Atiles and Chae-Eun Lee, and UIUC Linguistics PhD alumna Dr. Mien-Jen Wu.
Congratulations to all of these presenters! We are looking forward to seeing more graduate student research in 2025!
