The Linguistics Department at KU offers a full range of degrees: B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. The first linguistics courses at KU were offered in 1957. In 1968, Linguistics became a department and was authorized to offer a Ph.D. degree. Today, the unique strength of the Linguistics department is the systematic pairing of theoretical and experimental investigations of linguistic knowledge. Its nucleus of full-time faculty members in Linguistics, plus several actively involved faculty members in other departments, serves a student body of about 35 graduate students, 80 undergraduate majors, and many non-majors taking introductory and intermediate courses each semester.

Areas of special strength in the graduate program include Phonetics, Phonology, Syntax, First and Second Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics, and Neurolinguistics. The department also cooperates with other departments, such as Speech-Language-Hearing, Child Language, Indigenous Nations Studies, Anthropology, Education, and Psychology.

Linguistics Colloquy Schedule

(Thursdays at 4pm in Blake 206)

January 26- Phil Duncan (KU Linguistics)
February 9 - Dr Mythili Menon (Wichita State University)
February 23- Mingxing Li (KU Linguistics)
March 9- Dr Panying Rong (KU Speech-Language-Hearing)
March 27 (MONDAY, 4pm, 206 Blake)- Quentin Zhen Qin (KU Linguistics)
April 6- Dr Navin Viswanathan (KU Speech-Language-Hearing)
April 21 (FRIDAY, 3:30pm, 100 Stauffer-Flint)- Dr Jim Magnuson (Univ. of Connecticut) (Ingemann lecture)
May 4- Undergrad honors presentations

Recent Publications

  • Chien, Y.-F., Sereno, J. A., & Zhang, J. (2016). Priming the representation of Mandarin tone 3 sandhi. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 31(2), 179-189.
  • Chien, Y.-F., Sereno, J. A., & Zhang, J. (in press). What's in a word: Observing the contribution of underlying and surface representations. Language and Speech.
  • Chien, Y.-F., Sereno, J., & Zhang, J. (2016). Priming the representation of Taiwanese tone sandhi words. In C. DiCanio, J. Malins, J. Good, K. Michelson, J. Jaeger, & H. Keily (Eds.), Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (pp. 19-22). International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Archives.
  • Connelly, P., Minai, U., & Gabriele, A. (in press). Comprehension of Mimetics by Adult Native Speakers of Japanese. Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics.
  • Connell, K., Tremblay, A., & Zhang, J. (2016). The timing of acoustic vs. perceptual availability of segmental and suprasegmental information. In C. DiCanio, J. Malins, J. Good, K. Michelson, J. Jaeger, & H. Keily (Eds.), Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (pp. 99-102). International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Archives.
  • Darcy, I., Simonet, M., & Tremblay, A. (Eds.). (2016). Special issue: Phonology in the bilingual and bidialectal lexicon. Frontiers in Psychology.
  • Fiorentino, R., Naito-Billen, Y., & Minai, U. (2016). Morphological Decomposition in Japanese De-adjectival Nominals: Masked and Overt Priming Evidence. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 45(3), 575-597.
  • Fiorentino, R., Naito-Billen, Y., & Minai, U. (2015). Morphological decomposition in de-adjectival nominals in Japanese: Masked and overt priming evidence. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. More»
  • Gabriele, A., Fiorentino, R., & Covey, L. (in press). Understanding the symptoms and sources of variability in second language sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4.
  • Gaillard, S., & Tremblay, A. (2016). Linguistic proficiency assessment in second language acquisition research: The elicited imitation task. Language Learning, 66, 419-447.
  • Herd, W., Sereno, J., & Jongman, A. (2015). Cross-modal priming differences between native and nonnative Spanish speakers. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics More»
  • Johnson, A., & Minai, U. (2016). Children's knowledge of structure-dependent semantic interactions between logical words. Language Acquisition.
  • Johnson, A., Fiorentino, R., & Gabriele, A. (2016). Syntactic constraints and individual differences in native and non-native processing of wh-movement. Frontiers in Psychology, 17.
  • Jongman, A., & McMurray, B. (2017). On invariance: Acoustic input meets listener expectations. In A. Lahiri & S. Kotzor (Eds.), The Speech Processing Lexicon: Neurocognitive and behavioural approaches. Germany: Mouton DeGruyter.
  • Klassen, J., Wagner, M., Tremblay, A., & Goad, H. (2016). Prominence shifts in English and Spanish parallel constructions. In Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (pp. 76-85).
  • Lee, G., & Jongman, A. (2016). Perceptual cues in Korean fricatives. In A. Agwuele & A. Lotto (Eds.), Essays in Speech Processes - Language Production and Perception. United Kingdom: Equinox Publishing.
  • Lee, H., & Jongman, A. (2016). A diachronic investigation of the vowels and fricatives in Korean: An acoustic comparison of the Seoul and South Kyungsang dialects. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 46, 157-184.
  • Lee, H., Jongman, A., & Zhang, J. (2016). Variation and diachronic change in the nominal pitch accent system of South Kyengsang Korean. Phonology, 33(2), 325-351.
  • Lee, H. & Jongman, A. (2015) Acoustic evidence for diachronic sound change in Korean prosody: A comparative study of the Seoul and South Kyungsang dialects. Journal of Phonetics. More»
  • Leung, K., Jongman, A., Wang, Y., & Sereno, J. (2016). Acoustic characteristics of clearly spoken English tense and lax vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 140, 45-58.
  • Li, M., & Zhang, J. (in press). Perceptual distinctiveness between dental and palatal sibilants in different vowel contexts and its implication for phonological contrasts. Laboratory Phonology.
  • Liu, J., & Zhang, J. (2016). The effects of talker variability and variances on incidental learning of lexical tones. In C. DiCanio, J. Malins, J. Good, K. Michelson, J. Jaeger, & H. Keily (Eds.), Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (pp. 23-27). International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Archives.
  • Liu, J., & Zhang, J. (in press). A production and perception study on tonal neutralization in Nanchang Chinese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics monograph series no. 25: Studies on tonal aspects of languages.
  • McKenzie, A. (2016). Switch-Reference. In Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics.
  • McKenzie, A., & Newkirk, L. (2016). "Almost" as a variable-force modal. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (pp. 299-308).
  • McKenzie, A., & Newkirk, L. (in review). "Almost" at a distance and counterfactuality without tense. Linguistics and Philosophy, 53.
  • McMurray, B., & Jongman, A. (2016). What comes after [f]? Prediction in speech results from data explanatory processes. Psychological Science, 27(1), 43-52.
  • McMurray, B. & Jongman, A. (2016), What comes after /f/? Prediction in speech derives from data-explanatory processes.Psychological Science. More»
  • Minai, U., Isobe, M. & Reiko, O. (2015). Acquisition and use of linguistic knowledge: scrambling in child Japanese as a test case. Journal of Psycholinguistics Research. More»
  • Minai, U. (in press). Yooji-no imikaishaku-wa naze otona-no sore-to-wa kotonarunoka. [Why children's meaning comprehension differs from adults' meaning comprehension]. In K.-I Takami & I. Gyoda (Eds.), Hushigi-ni michi-ta kotoba-no sekai. [The world of language, full of wonder]. (pp. 68-71). Tokyo, Japan: Kaitakusha Publishing Company.
  • Minai, U., & Nadtochiy, N. (in press). Native and non-native comprehension of the Japanese existential quantifier nanko-ka. In M. Nakayama & Y.-C. Su, Language Acquisition and Language Disorders series. Studies in Chinese and Japanese Language Acquisition (pp. 197- 219). John Benjamins.
  • Minai, U., Gustafson, K., Fiorentino, R., Jongman, A., & Sereno, J. (in press). Rhythm-based language discrimination by pre-natal infants: A fetal magnetocardiography study. Neuroreport, 10.
  • Peter, L., Hirata-Edds, T., Feeling, D., Kirk, Wyman, Mackey, R., & Duncan, P. T. (2017). The Cherokee Nation immersion school as a translanguaging space. Journal of American Indian Education, 56(1), 5-31​.
  • Politzer-Ahles, S., & Zhang, J. (in press). Evidence for the role of tone sandhi in Mandarin speech production. Journal of Chinese Linguistics monograph series no. 25: Studies on tonal aspects of languages.
  • Pye, C. & Pfeiler, B. (in press). A comparative study of the acquisition of nominative and ergative agreement in European and Mayan languages. In Diane Massam, Lisa Travis and Jessica Coon (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Pye, C. (in press). The Comparative Method of Language Acquisition Research, University of Chicago Press.
  • Pye, C. 2016. Mayan Negation Cycles. In Elly van Gelderen (ed.), Cyclical Change Continued, 219-247. Amsterdam:  John Benjamins.
  • Pye, C. and Barbara Pfeiler. (in press). The acquisition of negation in three Mayan languages. Estudios de Cultura Maya 49.
  • Pye, C., Barbara Pfeiler & Pedro Mateo Pedro. (in press). The acquisition of Mayan languages. In Nora England, Judith Aissen and Roberto Zavala (Eds.), Handbook of Mayan Languages.John Benjamins: Amsterdam.
  • Qin, Z., & Jongman, A. (2016). Does second language experience modulate perception of tones in a third language? Language and Speech, 59(3), 318-338.
  • Qin, Z., Chien, Y.-f., & Tremblay, A. (in press). Processing of word-level stress by Mandarin- Speaking second-language learners of English. Applied Psycholinguistics.
  • Reichle, R. V., Tremblay, A., & Coughlin, C. E. (2016). Working memory capacity in L2 processing. Probus, 28, 29-55.
  • Sereno, J. A. (in press). How category learning occurs in adults and children. In A. Lahiri & S. Kotzor, The Speech Processing Lexicon: Neurocognitive and behavioural approaches. De Gruyter Mouton.
  • Sereno, J., Lammers, L., & Jongman, A. (2016). The relative contribution of segments and intonation to the perception of foreign-accented speech. Applied Psycholinguistics, 37, 303-322.
  • Sereno, J., Lammers, L., & Jongman, A. (2015). The relative contribution of segments and intonation to the perception of foreign-accented speech. Applied Psycholinguistics. More»
  • Tang, L., Hannah, B., Jongman, A., Sereno, J., Wang, Y., & Hamarneh, G. (2015). Examining visible articulatory features in clear and plain speech., Speech Communications, 75, 1-13. More»
  • Tremblay, A. (2016). Linguistic convergence/divergence or degree of bilingualism? Journal of French Language Studies, 26, 167-170.
  • Tremblay, A., & Coughlin, C. E. (in press). Cue-weighting mechanism and bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
  • Tremblay, A., Broersma, M., Coughlin, C. E., & Choi, J. (2016). Effects of native language on the learning of fundamental frequency in second-language speech segmentation. Frontiers in Psychology,  7,  985.
  • Wang, Y., Jongman, A., & Sereno, J. A. (in press). L2 Acquisition of Chinese Tone. In R. Sybesma, W. Behr, Y. Gu, Z. Handel, C.-T. Huang, & J. Meyers, Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics (ECLL). Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics. Brill Publishers.
  • Yakup, M., & Sereno, J. A. (2016). Acoustic correlates of lexical stress in Uyghur. Journal of the International Phonetics Association, 46(1), 61-77.
  • Yan, H., & Zhang, J. (2016). Pattern substitution in Wuxi tone sandhi and its implication for phonological learning. International Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 3(1), 1-45.
  • Zhang, J. (2016). Using nonce-probe tests and auditory priming to investigate speakers’ phonological knowledge of tone sandhi. In C. DiCanio, J. Malins, J. Good, K. Michelson, J. Jaeger, & H. Keily (Eds.), Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (pp. 12-18). International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Archives.
  • Zhang, J. (in press). Review of The phonology of Standard Chinese, 2nd edition, by San Duanmu, Oxford University Press, 2007 Journal of the International Phonetic Association.
  • Zhang, J., & Liu, J. (2016). The productivity of variable disyllabic tone sandhi in Tianjin Chinese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 25(1), 1-35.
  • Zhang, J., & Meng, Y. (2016). Structure-dependent tone sandhi in real and nonce words in Shanghai Wu. Journal of Phonetics, 54(1), 169-201.

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