The capstone of UIUC's Undergraduate Research Week, the Undergraduate Research Symposium is an annual event showcasing the breadth and scope of student research at UIUC. The Symposium features multiple sessions of student presenters sharing their research in oral and poster presentations throughout the day.
This year's Symposium was held on April 30th, 2026, and featured over 1,000 student presenters. This included a wide range of linguistics research - both from students majoring in Linguistics, and students conducting linguistics research within other fields of study. The various subfields represented in the research included sociolinguistics, morphophonology, computational linguistics, language acquisition, second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and bilingualism.
Several Linguistics students showcased their research with 15-minute oral presentation sessions.
Saket Reddy (Junior, CS + Linguistics) gave the talk BiasGRPO: Stabilizing Bias Mitigation in High-Variance Reward Landscapes via Group-Relative Policy Optimization, with research supervised by Ke Yang (Siebel).
Angie Lee (Graduating Junior, Linguistics) gave the talk Blocking and Licensing Structures in Malay Morphophonology. This research was supervised by Scott Nelson (Assistant Professor, Linguistics).
Adaora Mbanefo (Sophomore, Linguistics) gave the talk Question-Elicited Speech Across Naturalistic Language Learning Environments, with research supervised by Anastasia Stoops and Jessica Montag (Psychology).
Carine Li (Junior, Accountancy) presented the talk Optimizing Phishing Prevention Strategies for Businesses under the mentorship of Rosana Gómez-Cayapú (Lecturer, Linguistics).
Kaleigh Mueller (Senior, Global Studies) presented the talk The Role of Rhetoric in North Korea's Juche Ideology, with mentors Elizabeth King (PhD, Linguistics) and James Yoon (Professor, Linguistics).
In addition to the talks, many students also participated in the poster sessions.
Kadee Swanson (Junior, Linguistics) presented Colonial Necromancy: Examining the Revitalization of Italian Language Programming in Somalia, with research supervised by Saman Jamshidi (PhD Student, Linguistics).
Yunhan Chen (Junior, CS + Linguistics) and Kush Shah (Senior, Computer Engineering) presented Quantifying Energetic and Informational Masking in Digits-in-Noise Tasks for Enhanced Clinical Diagnostics under the direction of Dan Fogerty (Speech & Hearing Sciences).
Dennis Xiao (Freshman, CS + Linguistics) and Lucas Rothlisberger (Freshman, Neuroscience) presented Variable Plural Production and Language Ideology in Preschool Teachers’ Speech in Corrientes, Argentina under the direction of Karen Pasetto Ovelar (Spanish & Portuguese).
Ana Engelbrecht (Junior, Linguistics), along with Lydia Oesterling (Junior, SHS), Jennifer Arriaga-Lopez (Junior, SHS), Abrahám Chávez (Senior, SHS), and Jocelyn Gomez (Senior, SHS) presented Listening Effort During Bilingual Adult Speech Recognition: An EEG Study under the direction of Mary Flaherty (Speech & Hearing Sciences).
Left to right: Yunhan Chen, Dennis Xiao & Lucas Rothlisberger, Ana Engelbrecht
Chris Peter (Freshman, CS + Linguistics) along with Paola Campuzano, (Freshman, Latin American Studies) and Zehra Hazar (Freshman, Neuroscience) presented Linking Depth of Processing and Misspellings: A Preliminary Study under the direction of Luis David Gaytán-Soto (Spanish & Portuguese).
Kush Bhardwaj (Sophomore, CS + Linguistics) along with Grace He (Junior, Neural Engineering,), Tanisha Mandal (Sophomore, Neural Engineering), Veda Fernandes, (Sophomore, Computer Science), Riya Khandelwal (Senior, Biochemistry), and Atchaya Muthupalaniappan, Freshman (CS + Chemistry) presented Emotion Detection from EEG Using Arousal-Valence Classification under the direction of Yuan Yang (Bioengineering).
Samuel Hoover, (Sophomore, Astronomy, Linguistics) presented the poster Nemesis: Increasing the Dialogue Options of NPCs Using LLMs under the mentorship of Tai Armstrong (PhD Student, Linguistics).
Gilgamesh Auh (Junior, Linguistics) and Arjun Kathpalia (Senior, CS + Linguistics) presented Aligning Named Entities and Linguistic Urgency in Translated Weather Forecasts under the direction of Jonathan Dunn (Associate Professor, Linguistics).
Elise Ionin, (Sophomore, Linguistics) presented The Relationship Between Proficiency and Code-Switching in Spanish Heritage Speakers with mentors Silvina Montrul (Professor, Linguistics), and Martine Gallardo (PhD Candidate, Linguistics).
Left to right: Samuel Hoover, Gilgamesh Auh & Arjun Kathpalia, Elise Ionin
The Linguistics Department would like to congratulate each and every one of these presenters for their excellent showcase! Sincere thanks to the students for their hard work and to their mentors for supporting their research along the way. We look forward to seeing future research endeavors from our excellent undergraduate researchers.