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Jayhawks at the fall Acoustical Society of America in Honolulu. From left to right: Dr. Annie Olmstead (SPLH), Quentin Qin, Dr. Maite Martinez-Garcia (Ph.D. 2016, now at Texas A&M University-Commerce), Charlie Redmon, Dr. Allard Jongman, Dr. Goun Lee (Ph.D. 2015, now at Yonsei University, South Korea), Seulgi Shin, Dr. Annie Tremblay, Dr. Joan Sereno, Dr. Yue Wang (honorary Jayhawk, at Simon Fraser University, Canada), Dr. Jie Zhang, and Katrina Connell. Seated in the foreground is Dr. Navin Viswanathan (SPLH). Also present at the meeting were Dr. Olga Dmitrieva (M.A. 2005, now at Purdue University) and Tiffani Biro (SPLH).

WCCFL 2018 Conference. Phil Duncan (KU), Zhou Chen (UCLA), Andrew McKenzie (KU), Travis Major (UCLA), Harold Torrence (UCLA), Jie Zhang (KU)

Picture of Donald at the 24th Mid-Continental Phonetics and Phonology Conference last weekend, taken by Kelly Berkson.

Fall 2017 Major's Fair

KU Linguistics was well represented at the recent Tonal Aspects of Languages conference held in Buffalo, NY. From left to right: Katrina Connell, doctoral student, Allard Jongman, Jiang Liu (PhD 2013), Yu-Fu Chien (PhD 2016), Joan Sereno, Jie Zhang, and Yue Wang (honorary Jayhawk).

Patrick Connelly presenting at the 2016 Undergraduate Research Symposium

John-Patrick Doherty presenting at the 2016 Undergraduate Research Symposium

Keonya Jackson presenting at the 2016 Undergraduate Research Symposium

Graduate students Nick Feroce & Xiao Yang in the Neurolinguistics lab.

Undergraduate student, Tessa Scott in Tanzania studying Swahili.

Dr. Zhang collecting data on a Hakka dialect of Chinese.

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, Neurolinguistics, Semantics, and Indigenous Languages. The department also cooperates with other departments, such as Speech-Language-Hearing, Child Language, Indigenous Nations Studies, Anthropology, Education, and Psychology.

Linguistics Colloquy Schedule

In an effort to contain the spread of COVID-19 (coronavirus), the linguistics department has suspended all linguistics colloquy, including the Ingemann Lecture, for the remainder of the Spring semester. While we are sad that we have to cancel these exciting talks, we fully intend to reschedule the invited speakers for the 2020-2021 academic year.

Recent Publications

Chien, Y.-F., Sereno, J., & Zhang, J. (in press). What's in a word: Observing the contribution of underlying and surface representations. Language and Speech.More»
Chu, C.-Y., & Minai, U. (2018). Children's demonstrative comprehension and the role of non-linguistic cognitive abilities: a cross-linguistic study. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. More»
Covey, L., Gabriele, A., & Fiorentino, R. (2018). Can learners use morphosyntactic cues to facilitate processing? Evidence from a study of gender agreement in Hindi. Language Acquisition. More»
Fiorentino, R., Covey, L., & Gabriele, A. (2018). Individual differences in the processing of referential dependencies in English. Neuroscience Letters. More»
Gabriele, A., Fiorentino, R., & Covey, L. 2017). Understanding the symptoms and sources of variability in second language sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(4), 685-686. More»
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.More»
Krueger, B., Storkel, H., & Minai, U. (2018). The influence of misarticulations on children's word identification and processing. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. More»

More Publications

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. More»
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. More»
McKenzie, A. Eziz, G. & Major. T. (2018) Latent homomorphism and content satisfaction: The double life of Turkic auxiliary-(İ)p bol-’, with Gülnar Eziz and Travis Major. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3(1), 47. More»
Minai, U. (2017). 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. More»
Minai, U., & Nadtochiy, N. (2017). 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. More»
Minai, U., Gustafson, K., Fiorentino, R., Jongman, A., & Sereno, J. (2017). Fetal rhythm-based language discrimination: A biomagnetometry study. NeuroReport, 28(10), 561-564. More»
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.More»
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.More»
Pye, C. & Pfeiler, B. (2017). 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.More»
Pye, C. (in press). The Comparative Method of Language Acquisition Research, University of Chicago Press.More»
Pye, C., Pfeiler, B., & Mateo, P. (2017). The acquisition of negation in three Mayan languages. Estudios de Cultura Maya 49, 227-246.More»
Pye, C., Pfeiler, B., & Mateo, P. (2017). The acquisition of Mayan languages. In Nora England, Judith Aissen and Roberto Zavala (Eds.), Handbook of Mayan Languages, 19-42, London, Routledge. More»
Qin, Z., Chien, Y.F., & Tremblay, A. (2017). Processing of word-level stress by Mandarin-Speaking second-language learners of English. Applied Psycholinguistics, 38(3), 541-570. More»
Sereno, J. (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. More»
Tremblay, A., Broersma, M., & Coughlin, C. E. (in press). The functional weight of a prosodic cue in the native language predicts speech segmentation in a second language. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. More»
Tremblay, A., & Coughlin, C. E. (2017). Cue-weighting mechanism and bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 20(4), 708-709. More»
Tremblay, A., Namjoshi, J., Spinelli, E., Broersma, M., Cho, T., Kim, S., Martínez-García, M. T., & Connell, K. (2017). “Experience with a second language affects the use of fundamental frequency in speech segmentation.” PLOS One. More»
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. More»
Yang, X., Minai, U., & Fiorentino, R. (2018). Context-sensitivity and Individual Differences in the Derivation of Scalar Implicature. Frontiers in Psychology, 9:1720. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01720.
Zhang, J. (2017). Review of The phonology of Standard Chinese, 2nd edition, by San Duanmu, Oxford University Press, 2007 Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 47(1). More»

News

March 25, 2020
Prof. Annie Tremblay promoted to Full Professor!
November 26, 2019
Jongman elected AAAS Fellow
October 17, 2019
Having difficulty understanding someone speaking Mandarin? Look at their eyebrows

Graduate Student Presentations

Bates, J. (2017). The Essential Role of Indigenous Languages in Identifying Language Universals: The Case of Mayan Person-Making. Talk presented at the Graduate Research Symposium at University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS. More>>
Bates, J. (2017). The effect of a diminutive on Tseltal Person Marking, One Possessor: Two Agreements? Talk presented at the 50th Anniversary of KU Linguistics at University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS. More>>
Bates, J. (2017). Multiple Exponence in Oxchuc Tseltal. Talk presented at the Conference on Indigenous Languages of Latin America (CILLA) VIII at University of Texas-Austin, Austin, TX. More>>
Chien, Y-F., Fiorentino, R., Yang, X., & Sereno, J. (2016). Surface phonetic or underlying phonological representations: A mismatch negativity study of Mandarin tone assimilation. Poster presented at the 5th Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and Acoustical Society of Japan. Honolulu, HI. More>>
Cho, S., Jongman, A., Wang, Y., & Sereno, J. A. (2017). Effects of clear speech and language background on multimodal perception of English fricatives. 174th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), New Orleans, Louisiana. More>>
Covey, L., Gabriele, A., & Fiorentino, R. (2017). "Investigating island sensitivity in the processing of wh- dependencies: An ERP study." Poster presented at 30th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. MIT. More>>
Covey, L., Girolamo, T., Siew, C., Weyers, I., Yang, X., Vogt-Woodin, A., Coughlin, C., & Minai, U. (2017). Examining the role of pragmatics during children's comprehension of only: An eye-tracking study. Poster presented at the 42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, MA. More>>
Covey, L., Fiorentino, R., & Gabriele, A. (2018). Individual differences in the processing of wh-dependencies by native speakers and L2 learners: An ERP investigation. Talk presented in colloquium: “Event-related potentials and SLA: Brainwaves reveal new insights about individual differences in second language learning and processing,” organized by Sarah Grey & Harriet Bowden. American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2018. Chicago, IL. More>>

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