Linguistics Seminar

Seminars typically take place each Monday from 4-5 PM, either in-person or over Zoom. In-person seminars are normally held in the Lucy Ellis Lounge (LCLB 1080).

Contact Josh Dees for Zoom links and details and if you’d like to be added to the mailing list and receive announcements of new talks every week.

Spring 2024 Schedule
  • 29-Jan: LingSS Talk: Kara Federmeier
    • Talk Title: Connecting and considering: How the brain finds meaning in time
    • Abstract: 

      Humans have the remarkable ability to link perceptual stimuli with long-term memory – i.e., to glean the meaning of those stimuli – in a manner that is persistent and rapid but also flexible and goal-oriented. Work in my laboratory has revealed that in a relatively invariant time window, uncovered through studies using the N400 component of the event-related potential, incoming sensory information naturally induces a graded landscape of activation across semantic memory, creating what might be called "proto-concepts". This process of "connecting" affords the continuous infusion of meaning into human perception. Connecting can be -- but is not always -- followed by a process of further "considering" those activations through a set of more attentionally-demanding comprehension mechanisms. This kind of active comprehension entails selection, augmentation, and transformation of the initial semantic representations. The result is a limited set of more stable bindings that can be arranged in time or space, revised as needed, and brought to awareness. Collectively, these findings reveal the complex relations among sensory processing, attention, memory, and control systems that allow people to both rapidly and flexibly understand one another across the lifespan.

  • 1-Feb (Thursday): LingSS Talk: Adrienne Washington 
    • Talk Title: “A world beyond this one”: Sustaining afro-brasilidade through language, ritual, and culture teaching in northeastern Brazil   
    • Abstract: Theories on the intersections of language and race (raciolinguistics, Alim et al., 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2015) and on the semiotics of race (raciosemiotics, Smalls, 2015, 2020) are positioned well to understand how multiple identities co-craft personhood—that is, how language informs race, ethnoracial formations, and racism, and also how they recursively shape language. Yet such theories have not been regularly applied in exploring the place of religion (along with language and race) in identity co-construction, including intersectional hierarchies and the contestations of such hegemonic power formations by members of multiply marginalized groups.   

 

  • 19-Feb: Grad Workshop: Dr. Tania Ionin, Ping-Lin Chuang, Aylin Coşkun Kunduz, and Britni Moore
    • Topic: How to apply for research funding

 

  • 26-Feb: Grad Workshop: Anna Mendoza
    • Topic: Literature Review Reading and Writing

 

  • 4-Mar: Ling SS Talk: Lin Chen
    • Talk Title: Understanding fundamental processes in skilled reading: Insights from comparisons of first and second languages reading from a multi-methodological approach
    • Abstract: Reading comprehension is a continuous process in which the reader builds and updates a mental representation of the meaning conveyed in text incrementally. This process unfolds word by word, phrase by phrase, and sentence by sentence, occurring in both first (L1) and second language (L2) reading contexts. In this talk, I aim to address two questions: (1) Can we identify the core components of skilled reading in English that generalize across both skilled English native speakers and L2 readers? (2) Does the first language of skilled L2 readers continue to influence their reading of English?  To explore these questions, I will present multiple studies examining the incremental processes in English native speakers and skilled L2 learners who are from a variety of L1 backgrounds (including Spanish, Korean, and Chinese) as they read authentic materials from the New York Times. These studies use a combination of behavioral self-paced reading measures, ERPs, co-registration of eye tracking and EEG, and probabilistic language models (such as probabilistic context-free grammar, and transformer). Findings and the advantages of using multiple experimental methodologies to identify fundamental reading processes beyond specific paradigms will be discussed

 

  • 18-Mar: LingSS Talk: Tomas Riad
  • 25-Mar: LingSS Talk: Seth Cable
  • 1-Apr: Grad Workshop TBD
  • 8-Apr: Grad Workshop TBD
  • 15-Apr: Grad Workshop TBD
  • 22-Apr: Grad Workshop TBD
  • 29-Apr: LingSS Talk: Amanda Brown

 

For a list of seminars held in previous semesters, please see Past Seminars.