Language Science Colloquia

Please email Olga Dunaevsky odunaevs@uci.edu if you would like to be added to colloquia list langsci_colloquium@uci.edu

 

2024-2025

Tuesday, October 8

Language Science Community Talks

Fan-Gang Zeng, UCI School of Medicine
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Cochlear implants: Past, present and future"

 

Tuesday, October 15
Kenny Smith, School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Science, University of Edinburgh (Virtual Event)
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "The evolution of linguistic regularities and exceptions"

 

Tuesday, November 5

Language Science Community Talks

Elizabeth Pena and  Joseph Hin Yan Lam (both School of Education, University of California, Irvine)

11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Identification of DLD in bilinguals: where are we going" (Elizabeth Pena)

Title "Development and Validation of Nomogram prediction Models for Developmental Language Disorder in Bilingual Children" (Joseph Hin Yan Lam)

 

Tuesday, November 26

Special Talk sponsored by Bilingualism Matters in California

Abduweli Ayup (Educator, activist, linguist and poet)

11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Maintaining Bilingualism in Diaspora: Unique challenges and opportunities for Uyghurs outside of their homeland"

 

Tuesday, December 3
Karina Tachihara, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "TBA"

 

Tuesday, January 14
Bharath Chandrasekaran, Northwestern University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "TBA"

 

Tuesday, February 11
Bob McMurray, University of Iowa (Psychological & Brain Sciences)
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "TBA"

 

Tuesday, February 25
Vic Ferreira, UCSD
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title:TBA

 

Tuesday, April 8
Fernanda Ferreira, UCD
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "TBA"

 

Tuesday, April 15
Peng Qian, Harvard University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "TBA"

 

Tuesday, April 22
Matt Goldrick, Northwestern University

11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "TBA"

 

Tuesday, May 6
Bonnie Nozari, Indiana University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "TBA"

 

Tuesday, May 20
Elika Bergelson, Harvard University (Virtual Event)

11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "TBA"

 

Previous Language Science Colloquia

2023-2024

 

Tuesday, October 3
Laura Gwilliams, Stanford University 
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Computational architecture of speech comprehension"

 

Tuesday, October 10

Language Science Community Talks

Charles Torres and Jeremy Yeaton (both Language Science, University of California, Irvine)

11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Subregularity and Computational Complexity" (Charles Torres)

Title "Dissociating syntactic production & comprehension in aphasia" (Jeremy Yeaton)

 

Tuesday, October 17
Shravan Vasishth, University of Potsdam (Virtual Event)
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Individual differences in cue-weighting in sentence comprehension"

 

Tuesday, October 31

Language Science Community Talks

Yongjia Song and Zeinab Kachakeche (both Language Science, University of California, Irvine)
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Lexical Entrainment in Bilingual Language Use" (Yongjia Song)

Title: "The efficiency of dropping vowels in Romanised Arabic script" (Zeinab Kachakeche)

 

Tuesday, November 7
Vsevolod Kapatsinski, University of Oregon
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Why extension is nearly inevitable and how we can sometimes avoid it"

 

Tuesday, November 14
Rick Lewis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Memory for Prediction: Transformer Language Models as Psycholinguistics Theories"

 

Tuesday, January 30
Vitoria Piai, Radbound University (Virtual Event)
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title:"The part of language that is memory"

 

Tuesday, February 6

Language Science Community Talks

Jiaxuan Li and Shiva Upadhye (both Language Science, University of California, Irvine)
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "A decomposition of suprisal tracks the N400 and P600 brain potentials " (Jiaxuan Li)

Title: "Information-theoretic characterization of planning in speech" (Shiva upadhye)

 

Tuesday, February 13
Iva Ivanova, UTEP
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Syncing up for a good conversation: Cognitive mechanisms of conversational alignment in linguistically diverse speakers"

 

Tuesday, March 5
Judy Fan, Stanford University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title:"Cognitive tools for uncovering useful abstractions"

 

Tuesday, April 9 
Yang Xu, University of Toronto (Virtual Event)
8:00am - 9:20am
Title: "Deconstruction of human lexical creativity"

 

Tuesday, April 16

Language Science Community Talks

Weijie Xu and Hailin Hao (Language Science, UCI & Linguistics, USC)
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Strategic memory allocation in sentence processing" (Weijie Xu)

Title: "Information locality in sentence processing" (Hailin Hao)

 

Tuesday, April 23
Matt Davis, University of Cambridge
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Predicting and perceiving spoken words"

 

Tuesday, April 30
Liina Pylkkanen, NYU
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title:"LANGUAGE AT A GLANCE: How do our brains order syntactic and semantic computations when no order is imposed fromthe input?"

 

Tuesday, May 7
Michael Franke, University of Tubingen (Virtual Event)

11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "The pragmatics of communicating casual information"

 

Tuesday, May 14
Emily Bender, Washington University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Meaning making with artifical interlocutors and risks of language technology"

 

Tuesday, May 21
Jingjing Zhao, University of Edinburgh
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Cognitive, neural, genetic, and environmental determinants of developmental dyslexia: Multi-disciplinary evidence for a phonological deficint theory"

 

Previous Language Science Colloquia

2022-2023

 

Tuesday, October 4
Terry Regier, University of California, Berkeley
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Semantic categories in computational perspective

 

Tuesday, October 11

Language Science Community Talks

Noa Attali, University of California, Irvine
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: How contextual expectations and prosody can help disambiguate quantifier-negation utterances

 

Tuesday, October 18
Naomi Feldman, University of Maryland
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Modeling early phonetic learning from natural speech

 

Tuesday, October 25
Jianjing Kuang, University of Pennsylvania
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Tone acquistion beyond 10

 

Tuesday, November 15
Brian Dillon, University of Massachusetts Amherst
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Structure-Building in real time: The View from the Syntactic Ambiguity Processing Benchmark

 

Tuesday, January 17
Ryan Cotterell, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Information-Theoretic Methods in the Study of the Lexicon

 

Tuesday, January 24
Chris Cummins, University of Edinburgh
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Inferences about implicatures

 

Tuesday, January 31
Megan Boudewyn, University of California, Santa Cruz
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Using Electrophysiology to Track Attention and Memory Engagement durng Language Comprehension"

 

Tuesday, February 28
Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, University of Washington
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Unnatural Language Semantics"

 

Tuesday, March 14
Samar Husain, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
8:00am - 9:20am
Title: "The role of working memory constraints on processing of SOV languages"

 

Tuesday, April 4
Jonathan Brennan, University of Michigan
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Linking neural systems to syntax using parsing models"

 

Tuesday, April 11
Kyle Mahowald, University of Texas at Austin
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Exploring an Interesting Few Constructions in Large Langage Models"

 

Tuesday, April 18
Navin Viswanathan, Pennsylvania State University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Providing a General Account of Interactive Spoken Language Processes: Alignment or Synergy?"

 

Tuesday, April 25
Seth Wiener, Carnegie Mellon University

11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Adult second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese: A tale of mostly failure and the occasional success"

 

Tuesday, May 2
John Hale, University of Georgia, Athens
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Cross-linguistic computational neuroscience"

 

Tuesday, May 9
John Rawski, San Jose State University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Rethinking Poverty of the Stimulus"

 

Tuesday, May 16

Melinda Fricke, University of Pittsburgh
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: "Leveraging variation in linguistic experience to study adaptation in language processing"

UCI Language Science Community Talk

Tuesday, May 30

Janaina Weissheimer (Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte UFRN) and Luna LangYue
11:00am - 12:30pm

Title: Your mind, your words: Graph analysis and diverse linguistic experience (Janaina Weissheimer)

Title: Bilingual Reformation in Translation: A Case Study across Three Translating Modes (Luna LangYue)

 

Previous Language Science Colloquia

2021-2022

Tuesday, October 19
Anne Therese Frederiksen, University of California, Irvine
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Pronoun processing in American Sign Language: What we learn from variation among and within languages

 

Tuesday, October 26
Rodrigo Ranero, University of California, Los Angeles
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Identity in ellipsis reconsidered: The view from Kaqchikel and beyond

 

Tuesday, November 2

Language Science Community Talks

Susanne Jaeggi and Jacky Au, UCI

11:00am - 12:30pm

Title: Promoting learning and achievement across the lifespan via cognitive training and brain stimulation

 

Tuesday, November 9

Simon Kirby, University of Edinburgh
9:00am - 10:30am

Title: From Item to System: how cultural evolution creates linguistic structure in an iconic modality

 

Tuesday, November 16

Language Science Community Talks

Ariel Chan, UCLA
11:00am - 12:30pm

Title: Bilingualism in different forms: What does cultural identity tell us about code-switching preferences and cognitive control?

 

Tuesday, November 23
Noga Zaslavsky, MIT

11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Efficient compression and linguistic meaning in humans and machines

 

Tuesday, January 25

Language Science Community Talks

Emma Nguyen, UCI
11:00am - 12:30pm

Title:  From one verb class to another: Viewing the acquisition of passives through the lens of lexical semantic features

 

Tuesday, February 1
Marten Van Schjindel, Cornell University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Neural Language Priming

 

Tuesday, February 15

Language Science Community Talks

Julie Washington, UCI
11:00am - 12:30pm

Title: Language Variation and Reading: Teaching African American Children to Read

 

Tuesday, February 22
Adele Goldberg, Princeton University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Accessibility and historical change: how uncles and aunts became aunts and uncles

 

Tuesday, March 1
Letty Naigles, University of Connecticut
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: How Nonsense Words Reveal both Strengths and Challenges
in the Linguistic Representations and Processes of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

 

Tuesday, March 8
Kristen Syrett, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title:  What does it take to learn an adjective? 

 

Wednesday, March 30
Benjamin Spector, Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), Paris 
9:00am - 10:30am
Title:  Exhaustivity, Anti-exhaustivity and the effect of prior beliefs in the Rational Speech Act Framework

 

Tuesday, April 26
Rick Dale, UCLA 
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title:  Dynamic integration and cognitive organization in natural language performance

 

Tuesday, May 3
Farrell Ackerman and Rob Malouf, UCSD 
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title:  Understanding language particular morphological systems in order to discover general principles of morphological organization

 

Tuesday, May 10

Language Science Community Talks

Andrea Takahesu-Tabori, UCI
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title:  Impact of individual differences in ambient language diversity and cognitive control ability for L3 learning of Spanish grammatical gender by Mandarin-English bilinguals

 

Wednesday, June 1
Nick Chater, University of Warwick   
9:00am - 10:30am
Title:  Virtual bargaining: The hidden logic of joint action and communication

 

2020-2021

Tuesday, October 20
Damián Blasi, Harvard University
11:00am - 12:30pm
The exceptional nature of linguistic diversity and language change and why it matters for theories of language

Wednesday, November 11
Paula Rubio-Fernandez, University of Oslo
9:00am - 10:30am
The psychophysics of referential communication: Discriminability vs informativity

Tuesday, November 24
Language Science Community Talks
11:00am - 12:30pm
Andrew Cheng and Alandi Bates

Tuesday, December 8
Jeff Heinz, Stony Brook University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Deterministic Analyses and Learning of Optional Phonological Processes

Tuesday, December 15
Evelina Fedorenko, MIT
11:00am - 12:30pm
The language system in the human mind and brain

 

Tuesday, February 2
Kasia Hitczenko, Northwestern University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Modeling speech perception and phonetic learning from naturalistic speech.

 

Thursday, February 4
Xin Xie, University of Rochester
11:00am - 12:30pm

Navigating talker variability in speech perception.

 

Wednesday, February 10
Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, Harvard University
11:00am - 12:30pm

Towards an ecologically valid neurobiology of multilingualism.

 

Thursday, February 11

Jason Gullifer, McGill University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Bilingualism:  A socio-cognitive exercise in managing uncertainty.

 

Tuesday, February 16
Alexandra Carstensen, Stanford University
11:00am - 12:30pm

Language as a window into abstract thought.

 

Wednesday, February 17
Zara Harmon, University of Maryland
11:00am - 12:30pm
Mechanisms of overextension in language production.

 

Thursday, February 18
Connor Mayer, University of California, Los Angeles
11:00am - 12:30pm
Acquisition of speech sound categories.

 

Tuesday, April 6
Adina Williams, Facebook AI Research
11:00am - 12:30pm
Unnatural Language Inference

Tuesday, April 27
Jennifer Culbertson, University of Edinburgh
9:00am - 10:30am
Word and morpheme ordering preferences are affected by meaning, transparency, and perceptual experience 

Tuesday, May 4
Gary Lupyan, University of Wisconsin-Madison
11:00am - 12:30pm
From Telepathy to Whorf: How words structure and align our concepts

 

Tuesday, May 18
Language Science Community Talks
11:00am - 12:00pm
Industry Jobs Panel

Tuesday, June 1
Tal Linzen, NYU
11:00am - 12:30pm
Can surprisal explain syntactic disambiguation difficulty?

 

2019-2020

Monday, June 8
Remote Presentation
Tamar Gollan, UC San Diego
https://profiles.ucsd.edu/tamar.gollan

Monday, May 11
Remote Presentation
Sam Bowman, NYU
11:00am - 12:15pm
Learning acceptability judgments from raw text alone

Monday, March 2
Community Talks
Galia Bar-Sever, UC Irvine
11:00am - 11:50am, SSPB 1222

Wednesday, February 26
Linguistic Diversity Talk
Guadalupe Valdes, Stanford University
https://ed.stanford.edu/faculty/gvaldes
2:00pm - 3:30pm, HG 1030

Monday, February 24
Zoe Klemfuss, UC Irvine 
https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/klemfuss/
11:00am - 12:15pm, SSPB 1222
Causes and Effects of Narrative Variation in Childhood

 Thursday, February 6
Colin Phillips, University of Maryland
https://www.colinphillips.net/
11:00am - 12:15pm, SSPA 2112 (Room Change)
Not So Great Expectations

Monday, January 21
Amy Pratt, UC Irvine
"Identification of Spanish-English Bilingual Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD): The Differential Effect of Exposure Across Bilinguals with and without DLD"
Ashley Adams, UC Irvine
"Exploring the classroom experiences of dual language learners with and without special education needs"
11:00am - 11:50am, SSPB 1222

Monday, December 2
Karen Emmorey, San Diego State University
https://slhs.sdsu.edu/llcn/ 
11:00am - 12:15pm, SSPA 2112 (Room Change)
"The Neurobiology of Reading in Deaf and Hearing Adults"

Monday, October 14

Hannah Forsythe, Language Science UC Irvine
"Modeling the Source of Children’s Non-Adult-Like Pronoun Interpretations: Representation Versus Deployment"
Anne Therese Frederiksen, Chancellor's Postdoc Fellow UC Irvine
"Comprehension of pronouns in American Sign Language: Modality-general and modality-specific influences"
11:00am - 11:50am, SSPB 1222

Leon Bergen, UC San Diego
http://ling.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/profiles/LeonBergen.html

"Verbal Irony, Pretense, and the Common Ground"

2018-2019

Monday, June 3
Alexis Wellwood, University of Southern California
http://bcf.usc.edu/~wellwood/
"Seeing and Talking About Events"

Dylan Bumford, UCLA
http://dylanbumford.com
"Superlative Scope, Comparison Classes, and Negative Polarity"

Monday, March 11
Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh
https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/people/staff/Mark_Steedman.html
"The Combinatory Cognitive Science of Language"

Monday, March 4
Hans Kamp, University of Stuttgart
https://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/institut/mitarbeiter/hans/
"DRT Tutorial"

Monday, February 11
Stephanie Shih, University of Southern California
http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~shihs/
"Catching Phonology in the Pokéverse: Cross-linguistic Comparisons in Sound Symbolism"

"The Dynamic Nature of the Bilingual Language System"

Monday, January 14
Brandy Gatlin, UC Irvine
https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=6342
"Why They Be Talkin' Like That?"  A Look at Language Variation and Literacy"

Monday, December 3
Maria Polinsky, University of Maryland
http://www.mariapolinsky.com
"It's Still About Grammar: Cascading Structural Reorganization in Bilinguals"

Monday, November 19
Stefan Th. Gries, UC Santa Barbara
http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/stgries/
"Quantitative Corpus Applications: Morphemes, Multi-word Units, & Constructions"

Friday November 9
Judith Kroll, UC Riverside
https://bilingualismmindbrain.com/lab-members/judith-f-kroll/
"The Fate of the Native Language in Second Language Learning: A New Hypothesis About Bilingualism, Mind, and Brain"
Talk recording

 

2017-2018

 

Monday, May 21

Kara Morgan-Short, University of Illinois at Chicago
https://lcsl.uic.edu/hispanic-italian/faculty-instructors/hispanic-linguistics/kara-morgan-short
"The Neurocognitive processing of late-learned second language: The role of external and internal factors"

Victor Ferreira, University of California, San Diego
http://www.psychology.ucsd.edu/people/profiles/vferreira.html
"Syntactic Entrainment as a Candidate Mechanism for Learning the Meanings of Syntactic Constructions"

Monday, March 19
Ede Zimmermann, Visiting Scholar, UCI (Frankfurt)
http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~tezimmer/Zimmermann/
"Montague Grammar: 50 years after"

Monday, March 12
Caroline Féry, Goethe University Frankfurt
http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~cfery/
"The Grammatical and Prosodic Reflexes of Information Structure in a Typological Comparison"

Saturday, March 3
Ede Zimmermann, Visiting Scholar, UCI (Frankfurt)
http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~tezimmer/Zimmermann/
"Second Formal Semantics Boot Camp II"

Monday, February 26
Oana David, University of California, Merced
https://ucmerced.academia.edu/OanaDavid
"The role of grammar in computer-aided metaphor research"

Saturday, Februrary 17
Ede Zimmermann, Visiting Scholar, UCI (Frankfurt)
http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~tezimmer/Zimmermann/
"First Formal Semantics Boot Camp I"