This semester, many 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!
The new year kicked off with the 2026 meeting of the Linguistics Society of America in New Orleans. Sibel Arikoglu (PhD Student) presented the poster Beyond the Name: As a Symbol of Gender, Class, and Modernity in Turkey. Mikhael Hayes (PhD Student) presented Poetic Rhyme as a Tier-Based Strictly Local Constraint, coauthored by Scott Nelson. Joshua Dees (PhD Candidate) was a co-organizer and presenter for the organized session First Gen in the Classroom: Teaching by and for First-Generation Scholars in Higher Education.
Also in January was the Symposium About Language and Society in Austin, TX, where Saman Jamshidi (PhD Student) presented the talk At the Margins of Marginality: Chronotopes, Third Space, and the Politics of Silence in the Diaspora.
In February, Cory Lemke (PhD Student) presented the talk First Language Retention in International Adoptees. At the HK Global Fellows Colloquium in Gwangju, South Korea.
Joseph F Beckwith (PhD Candidate) presented the talk Tracing Velar Morphome Insertion in Spanish: A Diachronic Corpus Study of the L-Patter at Spanish Linguistics in the Southeash, which took place in Wilmington, North Carolina.
At the University of Illinois Coordinated Science Laboratory Student Conference Yixin Gu (PhD Student) presented the poster Isolating Informational and Modulation Masking under Controlled Energetic Masking in Speech-in-Speech Perception with coauthor Yan Tang.
Also in February was the International Conference on Heritage/Community Languages. Linguistics PhD Candidate Paul de Nijs presented his work, ‘Effects of Grammatical Feature Dissimilarities on the Comprehension of Relative Clauses in Adolescent Spanish Heritage Speakers,’ coauthored by Dr. Silvina Montrul. Additionally, Linguistics PhD Student Melika Rajabi presented ‘Differential Object Marking in Child and Adult Persian Heritage Speakers in the U.S,’ with coauthor Dr. Silvina Montrul.
At the end of February, UIUC PhD and MATESOL students made a strong showing at the 2026 Illinois Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages–Bilingual Education (ITBE) Annual Convention. Student researchers included Juan Camilo Gutierrez (MATESOL Student) - Silent Words, Living Voices: Extensive Reading for English Learners; Sasan Mansouri (MATESOL Student) - Ethical AI Integration for Multilingual Learners in ESL Writing; Kseniia Mikhailova (MATESOL Student) - Boosting L2 English Fluency with Multiword Expressions; Zeynep Sinan (MATESOL Student) - Developing Trajectories for VR-assisted Language Education; Anlu Zhu, Hoang Phuong Anh Vo, Zeynep Canpolat, Ananda Cahyani (MATESOL Students) - Exploring Immersive, Task-Based Learning with 360° Images in Lapentor; Nicholas Mueller (PhD Student) - Implementing AI Chatbots Across Proficiencies: Practical Strategies; and Kseniia Mikhailova (MATESOL Student) - Boosting L2 English Fluency with Multiword Expressions.
At the beginning of March, UIUC Linguistics showcased a wealth of student research at the 2026 Open House Poster Session. This session included research from Gunjan Anand - Synthetic Data Augmentation for Language Identification of Closely Related Languages in Low-Resource Settings; Haneul Choi (PhD Student) - Object order in Russian: An experimental approach; Yixin Gu (PhD Student) & Yan Tang - Explaining Intelligibility Improvement under Constrained Energetic Masking: Release from Informational or Modulation masking?; Mai Mohamed Eida (PhD Candidate) , Mayar Nassar, & Jonathan Dunn - How Well Do Tweets Represent Sub-Dialects of Egyptian Arabic?; Melika Rajabi (PhD Student) & Silvina Montrul- Differential Object Marking in Child and Adult Persian Heritage Speakers in the US; Eleanor Sand (PhD Student) & Tania Ionin - Negative Concord in L2-English and L2-Russian; Isela Silvera (PhD Student) - Korean Object Control: Weeding out Imposters; Anna Stephanov (PhD Student) - An Acoustic Study of the Veneto ‘Evanescent’ /l/; and Elif Varlik (PhD Student) - Virtual Study Sessions as Professional Development: Fostering Critical Multilingual Awareness among Adult Literacy Education Teachers.
In the same month, many student researchers presented at the American Association of Applied Linguistics, taking place in Chicago. MATESOL student Zeynep Sinan presented Investigating the interplay among teacher well-being, AI literacy, and ethics: ESL academic writing instructors’ experiences. MATESOL student Eda Yildirimer presented Identity Construction, Tension Navigation, and Pedagogical Change among Transnational Graduate Teaching Assistants at a Midwest University in the U.S.A. And PhD student Elif Varlik presented Supporting adult literacy teachers through virtual study sessions on critical multilingual awareness.
Additionally, PhD Candidate Amy Atiles presented the talk Emphasizing Hearer Knowledge With Definiteness: Input Versus Output Task at the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages International Convention & Expo, which took place in Salt Lake City, Utah.
April kicked off with UIUC hosting the 7th Sociolinguistics Symposium (SOSY 7), organized by PhD student Saman Jamshidi. PhD student Melika Rajabi presented "Maintaining Persian as a heritage language in the US", coauthored by Dr. Silvina Montrul. MATESOL student Mehmet Sahin presented "Practicing Belonging: Academic Speech, Identity, and Power in the University Speaking Center as a Transnational Contact Zone" coauthored by Dr. Laura Stengrim. Additionally, several undergraduate students presented their research as part of an ongoing project in the LING 222 Language in Globalization class: Kadee Swanson - Colonial Necromancy: Examining the Revitalization of Italian Language Programming in Somalia; Ben Toole - Blended Language in the Liminal Third Space; Caden Green - Exploring the Rebounds of Native Speakerism in EFL Education Across Nations; and Lillian Dowlatshahi - Cross-Cultural Conversation in Farsi and English.
Also in April, Sibel Arikoglu (PhD student) presented the talk Calculated Shifts: Exploring the Rationality of Code- Switching among Turkish- German Bilingual at The University of Kentucky Foreign Language Conference.
Priyanka Gupta (PhD student) presented the talk Asymmetry in Hindi-English PPs: Syntax, Morphology and Headedness in Bilingual DM at Formal Approaches to South Asian Linguistics.
Additionally, Ryan Corrigan (PhD student) presented the talk A Computational Model of Real-Time Phonetic Cue Integration at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.
In the second half of April, many UIUC students and faculty traveled to Cambridge, UK to present at the 18th meeting of Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (GASLA-18); PhD Student Melika Rajabi presented the talk Differential Object Marking in Child and Adult Persian Heritage Speakers in the U.S. with coauthor Silvina Montrul. Tania Ionin presented work completed with PhD students Chae Eun Lee & Isela Silvera: Nominal vs. Verbal -s as a Cue to Number in L2-English. Amelia Tighe (PhD candidate) presented L1 Transfer Effects on Word Order in L2 English Reading, with coauthor Tania Ionin. Amy Atiles (PhD candidate) presented The Benefits of Structured Input in a 6-week L2-English Article Intervention Study, with coauthor Tania Ionin. Eleanor Sand (PhD student) presented the poster I Can’t Get No Native-like Interpretation: Negative Concord in L2-English and L2- Russian with coauthor Tania Ionin. Chae Eun Lee (PhD candidate) presented the poster 'Second Language Acquisition of Optional Plural Marking in Korean' with coauthor Tania Ionin. Martine Gallardo (PhD candidate) presented the poster Grammatical Overlap and Verb Type in the L2 Acquisition of English Resultatives with coauthor Silvina Montrul. And Cory Lemke presented the poster First Language Retention in International Adoptee' with coauthor Silvina Montrul.
The end of the month culminated in the Undergraduate Research Symposium, which featured many presentations by undergraduates in the Linguistics + fields of study. Saket Reddy (Junior, CS + Linguistics) gave the talk BiasGRPO: Stabilizing Bias Mitigation in High-Variance Reward Landscapes via Group-Relative Policy Optimization. Angie Lee (Graduating Junior, Linguistics) gave the talk Blocking and Licensing Structures in Malay Morphophonology. Adaora Mbanefo (Sophomore, Linguistics) gave the talk Question-Elicited Speech Across Naturalistic Language Learning Environments. Kadee Swanson (Junior, Linguistics) presented the poster Colonial Necromancy: Examining the Revitalization of Italian Language Programming in Somalia. Yunhan Chen (Junior, CS + Linguistics) and Kush Shah (Senior, Computer Engineering) presented the poster Quantifying Energetic and Informational Masking in Digits-in-Noise Tasks for Enhanced Clinical Diagnostics. Dennis Xiao (Freshman, CS + Linguistics) and Lucas Rothlisberger (Freshman, Neuroscience) presented the poster Variable Plural Production and Language Ideology in Preschool Teachers’ Speech in Corrientes, Argentina. 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 the poster Listening Effort During Bilingual Adult Speech Recognition: An EEG Study. 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. 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. Samuel Hoover, (Sophomore, Astronomy, Linguistics) presented the poster Nemesis: Increasing the Dialogue Options of NPCs Using LLMs. Gilgamesh Auh (Junior, Linguistics) and Arjun Kathpalia (Senior, CS + Linguistics) presented Aligning Named Entities and Linguistic Urgency in Translated Weather Forecasts. And Elise Ionin, (Sophomore, Linguistics) presented The Relationship Between Proficiency and Code-Switching in Spanish Heritage Speakers.
Earlier this May, Haneul Choi (PhD student) presented the poster Object order in Russian: An experimental comparison across structure at Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics. Additionally, Sibel Arikoglu (PhD student) presented Code switching and Identity Construction among Turkish German Bilinguals at Illinois Global Institute Reading and Presentation Day.
Finally, the annual UIUC Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE) Graduate Student Symposium took place on May 7th and featured a variety of research from Linguistics Students. MATESOL student Ekaterina Shutenko presented Role of Context in Collocational Knowledge of English L1 and L2 Speakers. MATESOL student Nataliya Spirydovich presented Sensitivity to Idiomaticity and Idiom Comprehension in L2 Learners. PhD student Yulin Pan & PhD candidate Huiying Cai presented Can Elicited Imitation Tasks Measure Comprehension? Evidence from Comprehension Tasks and and Eye-tracking Data. PhD student Rebecca Yeager presented A mixed-methods analysis of cognitive validity in an integrated listening task: What can student notes tell us about listening processes? And PhD student Elif Varlik presented Virtual Study Sessions as Professional Development: Fostering Critical Multilingual Awareness among Adult Literacy Education Teachers.
We would like to congratulate all of the amazing students who presented their work this semester!
We also wish good luck to all those students presenting at conferences later this Spring and Summer:
- Anna Stephanov. Gradient Temporal and Acoustic Patterns of Raddoppiamento Sintattico in Rome Italian. Talk to be presented at the 56th Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages. May 14-16, 2026.
- Joseph F Beckwith. Tracing Velar Morphome Insertion in Spanish: A Diachronic Corpus Study of the L-Pattern. Talk to be presented at the 56th Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages. May 14-16, 2026.
- Melika Rajabi. Differential Object Marking in Child and Adult Heritage Speakers in the US. Talk to be presented at the 37th International Conference on Foreign and Second Language Acquisition. May 28-30, 2026.
- Saimou Zhang. Linguistic and cognitive empowerment via human-computer interaction dataset in the age of LLMs. Talk to be presented at SIG Writing Research School Conference 2026. May 29-June 1, 2026.
- Joseph F Beckwith. Testing the Psychological Reality of the Morphome: Evidence from Spanish. Talk to be presented at the 22nd International Morphology Meeting. June 18-21, 2026.
- Melika Rajabi. Differential Object Marking in Child and Adult Heritage Speakers in the US. Talk to be presented at the International Symposium on Bilingual and L2 Processing in Adults and Children. June 18th-19th, 2026.
- Sibel Arikoglu. When a Name Becomes a Taboo. Talk to be presented at the International Conference of the French Association for Cognitive Linguistics (Paris, France).June 22-24, 2026.
- Anna Stephanov. An Acoustic Study of the Veneto 'Evanescent' /l/. Poster to be presented at the 20th Conference on Laboratory Phonology. June 26-28, 2026.
- Zeynep Sinan, Sadler, R. W., & Gunduz, M. Implications of AI-integrated writing instruction for teacher identity development: Insights from tertiary level ESL instructors. Individual presentation to be given at the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium. July 7-11, 2026.
- Zeynep Sinan, Melike Akay, and Alexander Tang. Graduate student journeys and advice in publishing research in CALL. Panel to be presented at the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium. July 7-11, 2026.
- Elif Varlik. Building Critical Multilingual Awareness through Collaborative Online Study Sessions: A Multiple Case Study of LESLLA Teachers. Paper to be presented at the Literacy Education and Second Language Learning for Adults (LESLLA) Symposium. August 2026.
- Eda Yildirimer. MA TESOL Student Teachers’ Preparation, Challenges, and Growth in Community Based Teaching with Afghan Refugee Women. Paper to be presented at 21st Annual Symposium Literacy Education and Second Language Learning for Adults. August 20-22, 2026.
If you are a student who presented your work at a conference this semester and you would like to be added to this or future articles, please fill out this form.
