May 18-20, at Semantics and Linguistic Theory 22, Shevaun Lewis presents "The semantics and pragmatics of belief reports in preschoolers", reporting work done with Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz. Alexander Williams presents "Null Complement Anaphors as Definite Descriptions".

May 18-20 in Stuttgart, Kenshi Funakoshi presents "Backward control in external possession constructions in Japanese" at the 8th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL) at Universität Stuttgart, Germany.

May 11-13 at Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics in Bloomington, Indiana, Brad Larson presents "Not-so-across-the-board-movement in Macedonian".

Congratulations to Annie Gagliardi, who has been awarded a Postdoc Fellowship from the NSF/NEH Documenting Endangered Languages Fund. She will use the fellowship to pursue her project "Acquiring an Endangered Language: A corpus of child directed and child produced Tsez" with Marsha Polinsky at Harvard.

May 4-5, the department hosts Mayfest 2012, "The Role of Computational Models in Linguistic Theory". Mayfest is an annual two-day workshop organized by our graduate students. It brings together 8-12 distinguished researchers, representing diverse perpectives, to discuss some fundamental issue in linguistics. This year we welcome:

• Alexander Clark (Royal Holloway University of London)
• Robin Clark (University of Pennsylvania)
• Gaja Jarosz (Yale)
• Rick Lewis (University of Michigan)
• Roger Levy (University of California, San Diego)
• Lisa Pearl (University of California, Irvine)
• Amy Perfors (Adelaide)
• Jason Riggle (University of Chicago)
• Ed Stabler (University of California, Los Angeles)
• Matthew Stone (Rutgers)

Big congratulations to Terje Lohndal, who has accepted a position as Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim!

Congratulations to Naomi Feldman who, together with Rochelle Newman, won a UMD ADVANCE seed grant for a project titled "Children's real time processing of words and sounds." These one-year grants for female faculty provide funding for projects that include inter-disciplinary research.

Congratulations also to several other members of the Maryland Language Science community who also won ADVANCE grants:

• Elizabeth Redcay and Meredith Rowe, "Investigating shared neural systems for gesture and language comprehension"

• Yi Ting Huang and Meredith Rowe, "Exploring socioeconomic differences in children's syntactic development through real-time processing"

• Carol Espy-Wilson and Sandra Gordon-Salant, "Speech processing algorithms for elderly listeners with hearing loss"

Last year, the first year of the ADVANCE program, an award went to Valentine Hacquard and Erin Eaker (Philosophy).

Congratulations to Annie, Colin, Jeff, Rachel, Tess, and Yakov, who all ran well in the Azalea Classic in University Park on March 21. The results were impressive! Colin took 4th place overall, and 1st in his age group, with a time of 18:32, only a minute behind the winner. Yakov (21:14) came in 22nd overall, narrowly outpacing Jeff (21:42) at 27th. Tess had a time of 24:29, 3rd in her age group among the women. And 1st among the twenty-something ladies was Annie at 26:59. Also among the ling-related runners was Phlinger Chris Vogel.

Congratulations to Wing Yee Chow for receiving an Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship! It is a one-semester award for outstanding doctoral students in the final stages of writing their dissertation. The Graduate School awards approximately 40 Wylie Dissertation Fellowships per year.

April 18th, at Northwestern University's Syntax-Semantics lab, Brad presents "Strange Constituencies: Multidominance and an alternative".

April 19-21 in Chicago, Brad Larson and Alexis Wellwood will be presenting papers at the 48th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Brad's paper is "Sprouting Anew: Fragment answers, and here's why." Alexis's is "Meaning more or most: evidence from 3-and-a-half year-olds", co-authored with Darko Odic (JHU), Justin Halberda (JHU), Tim Hunter (Yale), Paul Pietroski (Maryland), and Jeff Lidz (Maryland).

On April 13-15, Shevaun Lewis presents "The pragmatics of belief reports in development" at WCCFL XXX, reporting on work in with Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz . The paper concerns 4-year-olds' non-adult-like truth value judgments of sentences with "think". It argues that these reflect parenthetical interpretations of ‘think’, arising from to a failure to grasp the pragmatic relevance of belief in context.

Jeff Lidz is also giving the last of three plenary lectures at this WCCFL, an honor granted despite Jeff's near arrest on the Santa Cruz beach nine years ago at WCCFL XXI.

Also on the program are talks by Maryland alums Chizuru Nakao, Masaya Yoshida & Ivan Ortega-Santos, and Tim Hunter, plus a poster by former postdoc Ming Xiang.

April 6, Valentine Hacquard gives a colloquium talk at New York University Linguistics.

March 31-April 3, Wing Yee Chow will be presenting at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting (CNS 2012) in Chicago. She will be presenting a poster, "Wait a Second: Eliminating the 'Semantic Illusion' in Role-reversed Sentences", coauthored by Colin and Suiping Wang at South China Normal University.

March 31-April 1, the first annual PHLINC brings together young researchers working on events in philosophy, linguistics and psychology. There will be eight talks by students – coming from UCLA, Michigan State, Buffalo, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Hopkins, and Maryland – plus invited talks by Professor Achille Varzi of Columbia University, and our own Paul Pietroski. PHLINC is organized by PHLING, a graduate research group on shared issues of linguistics and philosophy.

In the March issue of Language, "A test of the relation between working memory capacity and syntactic island effects" by alumni Jon Sprouse and Matt Wagers with Colin Phillips. The authors report finding no evidence of a relationship between working-memory capacity and island effects, in tests of three hundred speakers of English.

March 29, Alexander Williams is giving a colloquium talk in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania.

March 28-30, Wing Yee Chow, Ewan Dunbar, Dave Kush, Sol Lago, Shevaun Lewis, Terje Lohndal, Dan Parker, and Megan Sutton are presenting at the 35th annual Colloquium of Generative Linguistics in the Old World.

Sol Lago and Dan Parker will present "Retrieval interference in the resolution of anaphoric PRO" as part of the workshop The Timing of Grammar: Experimental and Theoretical Considerations

Philip Resnik is a plenary speaker at this year's American Association for Applied Linguistics conference (AAAL 2012) in Boston, March 24-27, for which this year's conference theme is Interdisciplinarity. He'll be speaking on “The Linguistics of Spin: A Computational Linguist’s Forays into Social Science”.

March 25 in Philadelphia, Masahiko Takahashi and Kenshi Funakoshi present "On PP left-branch extraction in Japanese" at the 36th Penn Linguistics Colloquium.

March 21 at the Workshop on Perception: Reality and Illusions, hosted by Georgetown's Program in Cognitive Science, Colin Phillips presents "Linguistic Illusions: Where You See Them, Where You Don't".

March 16, Valentine Hacquard is giving talks at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, on modality and the acquisition of attitude verbs. Her Friday colloquium talk is "Understanding desire and belief reports."

March 14-16, Brad, Colin, Dan, Dave, Jeff, Shevaun, Sol and Wing Yee represent UMD at the 25th annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. One of the invited talks, "Fast Stuff and Slow Stuff: Is a unified theory desirable?", will be given by Colin Phillips and Shevaun Lewis. The other talks are:

• Shevaun Lewis, Bradley Larson and Dave Kush, "What and when can you fill a gap with something?"
• Wing-Yee Chow, Colin Phillips and Suiping Wang, "Turning the 'Dumb N400' into the 'Smart N400': What role-reversed sentences tell us about the time course of predictions"
• Dave Kush, Jeffrey Lidz and Colin Phillips, "Interference-insensitive local anaphora resolution: Evidence from Hindi reciprocals"
• Dave Kush, Jeffrey Lidz and Colin Phillips, "Online use of relational structural information in processing bound-variable pronouns"
• Dan Parker, Sol Lago and Colin Phillips, "Retrieval interference in the resolution of anaphoric PRO"
• Susan Teubner-Rhodes, Alan Mishler, Ryan Corbett, and Jared Novick (University of Maryland, College Park), Llorenç Barrachina and Mònica Sanz-Torrent (Universitat de Barcelona), and John Trueswell (University of Pennsylvania), "The bilingual advantage: Conflict monitoring, cognitive control, and garden-path recovery"

The conference is also rich with Maryland alumni: recent postdoc Ming Xiang; recent PhDs Brian Dillon, Matt Wagers, and Masaya Yoshida; recent Baggett Fellow Dave Kleinschmidt; and recent BA Cynthia Lukyanenko.

March 15, Dustin Chacón presents work with Alexis Wellwood at the Workshop for Languages with and without Articles, at CNRS / Paris 8. The talk, "A Superlative Puzzle for Bošković's DP/NP Parameter", observes that across languages prenominal possessors block a 'relative' interpretation of superlatives, and argues for a unified account of asymmetries in the interpretation of superlatives in languages with and without articles. The argument relies crucially on the existence of a D projection.

March 8-12 at Georgetown, Annie Gagliardi, Megan Sutton, Kate Harrigan, Tara Mease and Jeff Lidz present "Now you see it, now you don't: Advantages and pitfalls of in-depth analysis of preferential looking data" at the 2012 Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics.

Congratulations to Sol Lago and Wing Yee Chow, joint winners of the Jerrold J. Katz Young Scholar Award for 2012. This is an award for the best paper by a young researcher (student, postdoc, early faculty) at the 2011 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, held at Stanford University in March 2011. The title of their presentation was "Word frequency affects pronouns and antecedents identically: Distributional evidence." They will be presented with the $500 award at the 2012 CUNY conference, which will take place in New York City March 14-16.

Now online, videos of both Howard Lasnik's and Brad Larson's talks at "Islands in Contemporary Syntactic Theory," at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, 16-19 November 2011. Howard's talk was "Another Look at Island Repair by Deletion", Brad's was "What can Multidominance tell us about islands?".

On Feb. 18 Maryland hosted the Second Mid-Atlantic Colloquium of Studies in Meaning, with five presentations by UMD students in linguistics and philosophy:

• Michaël Gagnon "Against an NPE analysis of D-type pronouns"
• Shevaun Lewis "Pragmatics in the development of belief reports"
• Yu Izumi "Why we need no reference to kinds: A four-dimensional approach to the semantics of bare nominals"
• Chris LaTerza "Japanese tachi"
• Alexis Wellwood, Chris Vogel, Brendan Ritchie, Rachel Dudley, Erin Bennett "Events and their causes: A transparency issue"

Roger Schwarzschild of Rutgers University gave the invited talk, "A Neo Neo Neo Davidsonian Analysis of Nouns".

MACSIM brought together over 70 graduate students and faculty from the region between DC and NYC to share and develop new student research on linguistic meaning, from theoretical, experimental, and philosophical perspectives. This year's MACSIM was organized by Alexander Williams and Valentine Hacquard, and generously supported by the College of Arts and Humanities, the Department of Linguistics, and the Department of Philosophy.

Congratulations to Brian Dillon, Ewan Dunbar and Bill Idsardi whose "A single stage approach to learning phonological categories: Insights from Inuktitut'' is to appear in Cognitive Science. The paper argues against the view that phonological acquisition is a 'two-stage' process, suggesting an alternative conception and presenting a Bayesian model that acquires phonemic categories in a single stage. Using data from Inuktitut, it is shown that the model reliably converges on a set of phoneme-level categories and phonetic-level relations among subcategories, without making use of the lexicon. A prepublication draft is available.

Please greet Romy Lassota and Lyn Tieu who are visiting UMD Linguistics this semester. Romy is a graduate student at the University of Geneva studying Language Acquisition and Sentence Processing. Lyn is a graduate student at the University of Connecticut specializing in Language Acquisition.

Recently Philip Resnik appeared on WAMU's "The Kojo Nnamdi Show" (transcript) to discuss automatic sentiment analysis and social media.

On Feb. 7 Brad Larson is presenting "WYSIWYG RNR" at the CUNY Syntax Supper. Brad argues against current approaches to Right Node Raising constructions, positing instead a what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach where the first conjunct is syntactically inchoate, its interpretation being derived post-syntactically.

On January 26, Yakov Kronrod , Susan Teubner-Rhodes, and Jeff Lidz went to Northwood High School in Silver Spring to speak with 100 AP Psychology students about linguistic structure and its connection to language acquisition and other areas of cognition.

Congratulations to Kenshi Funakoshi, whose "On Headless XP-Movement/Ellipsis'' is to appear in Linguistic Inquiry. The paper makes two proposals: that Copy operation must apply to as small an element as possible, and that head-movement may be instantiated either by substitution or by adjunction. It argues that these proposals explain the syntax of "headless XPs".

Congratulations to Jeff Lidz and Csilla Katjar, on issue 19(1) of Language Acquisition, the first with Jeff as Editor-in-Chief and Csilla as Managing Editor.

Annie Gagliardi, Brad Larson, Dave Kush, and Alexis Wellwood – with Naomi Feldman, Colin Phillips, Jeff Lidz, Paul Pietroski and Justin Halberda from Johns Hopkins – are presenting at the Linguistics Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, January 5th-8th 2012.

Brad will present "Sluicing without antecedents is fed by extraposition".

Annie is presenting two talks. The first, "Distinguishing input from intake in Tsez noun class acquisition," is being presented as part of an LSA symposium called Psycholinguistic Research on Less Studied Languages. The second, "Psycocomputational approaches to the acquisition of noun phrases in Tsez", is to be presented with Naomi Feldman and Jeff Lidz, at Psychocomputaional Models of Language Acquisition, a meeting being held in conjunction with the LSA.

Dave, with Jeff and Colin as co-authors, will present "Processing bound-variable anaphora: Implications for memory encoding and retrieval".

Alexis, with Jeff, Paul and Justin Halberda as co-authors, will present "When to quantify: syntactic cues in the acquisition of novel superlatives", showing that 4-5 year-old children use the category distinction between Adjective and Determiner as a cue to the interpretation of words in superlative form, relying more on this than on the cue of partitive "of".

Juan Uriagereka, Professor in Linguistics and Associate Provost of Faculty Affairs, has recently published a new book, Spell-Out and the Minimalist Program. Since Juan invented the multiple spell-out model in 1999 it has been one of the most influential lines of research in syntactic theorizing. The model simplified a crucial element of the minimalist account of language making it a more accurate reflection of syntax and its acquisition. In this book he explores important consequences of the multiple spell-out hypothesis and of the linked notion of cyclicity. He combines the latest thinking in linguistics with perspectives drawn from physics, biology, and animal behaviour, aiming thereby to advance the field first described by Noam Chomsky as biolinguistics.

The LSA's Best Paper in Language 2011 Award goes to Jon Sprouse, a Maryland Linguistics alumnus, for his "A test of the cognitive assumptions of magnitude estimation: Commutativity does not hold for acceptability judgments", in Language 87(2). The award is given for the best paper published in the journal in any given calendar year. This year Jon shares the award with Thomas Weskott and Gisbert Fanselow, for their "On the informativity of different measures of linguistic acceptability".

Dave Kush has a paper published in the Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 21, entitled "Height-Relative Determination of (Non-Root) Modal Flavor: Evidence from Hindi". The paper pursues the idea that a modal's flavor is determined by its attachment height.

Dave Kush is back from three weeks in India running experiments on the processing of Hindi reciprocals. The work was done at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University.

"Poverty of the Stimulus Revisited" by Robert Berwick, Paul Pietroski, Beracah Yankama and Noam Chomsky has appeared in September's Cognitive Science. The article develops the claim that "poverty of the stimulus arguments remain an important source of support for appeal to a priori structure-dependent constraints on the grammars that humans naturally acquire."

Philip Resnik was recently in California to give the keynote talk at the 2011 Sentiment Analysis Symposium, and to speak to the machine translation group at Google Research about his work on crowdsourcing and translation, in a new Google-funded collaboration with Ben Bederson (UMD Computer Science) and Chris Callison-Burch (JHU Computer Science) called "Translate the World".

Comments by Philip were also featured in New Scientist's story about Apple's new voice assistant, Siri on November 3.

Howard Lasnik is the invited speaker at "Islands in Contemporary Syntactic Theory," at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, November 16-18. Brad Larson is giving a talk at the same venue, entitled "What can Multidominance tell us about islands?".

Representing UMD on Nov. 4-6 at the B.U. Conference on Language Development are Annie, Angela, Megan, Jeff, and undergrad major Mike Fetters, with these presentations:

• Annie Gagliardi and Jeffrey Lidz, "The Power of the Prior: Asymmetries in Word Learning vs. Word Class Learning"
• Angela Xiaoxue He and Jeffrey Lidz, "Mapping Intransitive Verbs to Self Propelled Motions"
• Megan Sutton, Mike Fetters & Jeffrey Lidz, "Parsing for Principle C at 30-months"
• John Trueswell, Alon Hafri, Dan Kauffman and Jeff Lidz, "Development of parsing ability interacts with grammar learning: Evidence from Tagalog and Kannada"

Dustin Chacón will be presenting his work on head movement in the Bangla DP at the CUNY Syntax Supper on Nov. 1st. He will argue that the complex feeding and bleeding relationships between noun-to-classifier substitution and classifier-raising in the Quantificational Approximateness construction show that certain word formation operations must be ordered before and after syntactic operations. This means that the common belief that head movement effects are entirely post-syntactic is not a tenable one, and suggests a four-tiered DP structure (as in Tang's (1990) or Borer's (2005) work) with distinct numeral and number/classifier projections.

Title of Paper: "Word Formation before and after Spellout, or, Deriving Simpson's Conjecture"

Colin Phillips will be the keynote speaker at the Linguistics Association of Portugal conference in Lisbon, October 26-28.

On October 20 at the Johns Hopkins Cognitive Science Colloquium, Valentine Hacquard presents "Understanding Desire and Belief Reports". In this talk Valentine develops a semantic account of the asymmetry in young children's understanding of "think" versus "want", against alternatives that link this to development in children's Theory of Mind.

Colin Phillips is giving a talk in the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher lecture series, 4:00pm on Thursday October 20th in 1400 Marie Mount Hall. The title of the talk is "Linguistic Illusions: Where you see them, where you don't".

Terje Lohndal will give a linguistics colloquium talk on Friday, October 14th at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He will explore the consequences of a dynamic theory of Spell-Out where two phrases can never be merged, showing how this theory provides a transparent mapping onto Neo-Davidsonian logical forms. He will further discuss the theory's syntactic implications with respect to copy theory, movement and multi-dominance structures.

Title: "Spell-Out, Movement, and the Copy Theory"

Arizona colloquium website

Michaël Gagnon and Alexis Wellwood have a paper published in the Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 21, entitled "Distributivity and modality: where 'each' may go, 'every' can't follow". The paper examines the differential behavior of "each" and "every" with respect to the Epistemic Containment Principle proposed by von Fintel and Iatridou (2003). It is shown that this principle can be derived from more general mechanisms of quantifier scope-taking in grammar.

Alexis Wellwood and Valentine Hacquard (along with co-author Roumyana Pancheva at the University of Southern California) have a paper appearing in the Journal of Semantics. The paper is called "Measuring and Comparing Individuals and Events", and looks at parallelisms in the interpretation of comparison across the nominal and verbal domains.

Norbert Hornstein and Juan Uriagereka will be giving invited talks at the University Potsdam, October 4th and 5th, for "The Minimalist Program: Quo Vadis?- Newborn, Reborn, or Stillborn".

Jeff Lidz will be giving the keynote address at the European Experimental Pragmatics (Euro-XPrag) Pisa Workshop on October 1.

Congratulations to a team of 12 Maryland linguists, and their hometeam support crew, who took part in the Ragnar Relay on September 23-24 (2011). The relay covered a grueling 200-mile route from Cumberland, in the western tip of Maryland, to Washington DC. Each runner covered 3 of the 36 legs, covering a total of 13-22 miles. The crew ran continuously for around 27 hours and 30 minutes, running many legs at night, and many in heavy rain. Despite it all they finished 150 minutes sooner than expected. On the team were 5 faculty and 7 graduate students, all of whom are now looking forward to running in dryer fall weather. An amazing effort by runners Aaron, Akira, Annie, Brad, Colin, Dan, Dave, Ellen, Jeff, Shevaun, Tess and Yakov!

The first Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning was held on September 23, 2011, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. It was jointly organized by students and faculty from Johns Hopkins and UMD.

The event brought together 140 faculty, researchers and students working on computational topics related to human language, from 14 universities: Delaware, Princeton, George Mason, George Washington, Columbia, Penn, Michigan, Haverford, Carnegie Mellon, NYU, University of Maryland Baltimore County, plus the two organizing institutions. Capitalizing on the breadth of computational research into human language, the colloquium stimulated fruitful discussion between linguists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and information scientists on a very impressive range of genuinely cutting-edge student research.

Congratulations to our local members of the organizing team: Ewan Dunbar, Raul Guerra, and Hal Daumé III.

Wing Yee Chow and Sol Lago recently taught a two-hour workshop on EEG and MEG to a group of fourteen students in the NSF-funded Visual Language and Learning (VL2) Science of Learning Center hosted at Gallaudet University. The students came from a number universities: Gallaudet, UC Davis, Boston University, U Toronto, U New Mexico, UT Austin, Rochester, Georgia Tech, and UI Urbana-Champaign.

Howard Lasnik has recently contributed chapters to several important new collections and handbooks, including:

• "Some roots of Minimalism" with R. Freidin in the Oxford University Press Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism (OUP)

• "Minimalism" and "Government and Binding" in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences (CUP)

• "Syntax" in the Encyclopedia of Human Behavior (Elsevier)

• "Structure" with Juan Uriagereka in the Handbook of Philosophy of Linguistics (Elsevier)

• "Brief overview of the history of generative syntax" with Terje Lohndal in The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax (CUP)

• "What kind of computing device is the human language faculty?" in The Biolinguistic Enterprise: New Perspectives on the Evolution and Nature of the Human Language Faculty (OUP)

• "Single cycle syntax and a constraint on quantifier lowering" in Biolinguistic Explorations: Interfaces in Language Design (John Benjamins)

Official opening ceremonies for the Maryland Neuroimaging Center will be at 12pm on Tuesday September 20th. This is a large new facility that currently houses a state-of-the-art MRI scanner, and will soon be a truly multi-modal center, which will include magnetoencephalography (MEG), electroencephalograpy (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) facilities. The center is managed by the cross-department Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) program. It has been made possible by a $2M Major Instrumentation Grant from NSF, and by substantial investment from many different colleges and centers across the university. Linguistics has played an important role in this effort. David Poeppel (now at NYU) was one of the founders of the initiative, together with Nathan Fox (Human Development). Colin Phillips was one of the PIs on the NSF grant, and is a member of the MNC leadership team.

Colin Phillips is giving the "Linguistics Association" Lecture at the Linguistics Association of Great Britain annual meeting in Manchester on Sept 7-10. His talk is entitled "What is a mental grammar?" and it will be accompanied by a special session of the conference on the theme of the Psycholinguistics of Grammar.

Please greet new postdoc Kristine Yu. Kristine works on computational modeling of tone, prosody, and their acquisition. She recently received her PhD from UCLA, with a dissertation titled "Learning tone from the speech signal," under advisors Ed Stabler and Megha Sundara.

Congratulations to Jeff Lidz and Csilla Kajtar! Beginning in 2012, Jeff will be the Editor-in-Chief of Language Acquisition, a leading journal for research in language development and linguistic theory. Csilla will join Jeff at the journal, in the position of Managing Editor.

Carolina Petersen and Kenshi Funakoshi will be presenting their work at GLOW in Asia. The workshop will take place in Mie, Japan on September 7-8, 2011. Carolina Petersen will present a poster titled "Control in Subjunctive Clauses in Brazilian Portuguese: Evidence for Tense Defectiveness", showing the role of tense in accounting for the behavior of null subjects in subjunctive clauses in Brazilian Portuguese and in explaining the obviation effect in Romance languages. Kenshi Funakoshi will present a paper titled "Cyclic Spell-Out and Ellipsis", proposing a convergent-based Spell-Out model, which deduces PIC effects and gives a simple account for a MaxElide paradigm.

Terje Lohndal will be teaching a PhD course at the University of Oslo from September 5-23. The title of the course is 'Language as Cognitive Science'.

Shevaun Lewis is presenting her work in Paris at AMLaP, the annual Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference, on September 1. She will be discussing results from an eye-tracking study on the processing of scalar implicatures, with a poster titled "Computing scalar implicatures is cost-free in supportive contexts."

Congratulations to Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz, who have been awarded a 3-year research grant from the National Science Foundation on "Acquiring the semantics and pragmatics of attitude verbs."

We are happy to welcome six new members to our graduate program: Juliana Gerard (UCLA), Yuki Ito (University of Tokyo), Jeffrey McMahan (U Michigan), Shota Momma (U Washington), Carolina Petersen (Universidade de São Paulo), and Rachael Richardson (Maryland and JHU).

A warm welcome to Masahiko Takahashi, our new postdoctoral fellow in syntax. Masa recently graduated from the University of Connecticut at Storrs, with a dissertation focusing on Case in Japanese.

We are happy to welcome two new Baggett Fellows, Rachel Dudley (NYU '11, Linguistics) and Erin Bennett (UCSD '11, Linguistics), as well as Cybelle Smith (Stanford '11, Linguistics), a new Research Assistant to Colin Phillips in the psycholinguistics lab.

Congratulations to Ariane Rhone, who is starting a postdoctoral position at the University of Iowa. Her appointment is split between the Department of Psychology and the Medical School. She recently completed a PhD dissertation supervised by Bill Idsardi on the topic of neural measures of audio-visual integration.

Shayne Sloggett is beginning the PhD program in linguistics at UMass Amherst, after one year as a Research Assistant to Colin Phillips in the pycholinguistics lab. Congratulations and best of luck to Shayne!

Brad Larson's "A Dilemma with Accounts of Right Node Raising" is to appear in issue 43(1) of Linguistic Inquiry, Winter 2012. Earlier this summer Brad presented a paper at the Comparative Syntax Workshop in Amsterdam ("Swiping Subdued: A simpler approach"), and gave an invited talk to the Syntax Roundtable at the University of Washington ("Any Way You Sluice It: A new way to escape ellipsis").

The July 15 issue of Science includes "Sentence and Word Complexity", by Jeffrey Heinz (Delaware) and Bill Idsardi. A prepublication draft is available.

Shiti Malhotra has accepted a lectureship in the Program in Linguistics at Northeastern University, for the coming academic year.

Alex Drummond is beginning a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University (England). He will be working on a project with Professor Wolfram Hinzen, supported by UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

PHLING, the Philosophy & Linguistics reading group, will meet every Thursday this summer, 3:30-5:30 in the 1407 lounge. New and old participants welcome.

Jeff Lidz and Colin Phillips have been invited to teach courses this summer at the LSA Linguistic Institute, hosted by the University of Colorado at Boulder. Jeff's course is "Learning in Generative Grammar: Representation, Intake and Update". Colin's is "Grammatical Illusions: Encoding and Navigating Linguistic Structures in Real Time".

Yakov Kronrod won an NSF Scholarship to attend the Machine Learning Summer School at Purdue University from June 13 to 24 of 2011.

Congratulations to Shevaun Lewis, who has won the College of Arts and Humanities Service award in the category of Graduate Student, for all of the work she has done above and beyond the call of duty for the linguistics department, for the language acquisition lab, and for the executive committee of the "Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity" IGERT. The award will be presented to Shevaun at the Fall 2011 College Convocation on September 13, 3:30pm at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

Naomi Feldman recently joined the Department of Linguistics as an Assistant Professor in computational psycholinguistics. Her research uses tools from statistics and machine learning to formalize questions about at how people learn and represent the structure of their language. For example, behavioral evidence indicates that perception of sounds is biased toward the centers of phonetic categories. Can we predict this bias by assuming that listeners are using knowledge about which sounds tend to occur most often? Infants learn to segment words around the same time that they learn phonetic categories. How would learners benefit by using information about which sounds occur together in words to constrain phonetic category acquisition? Naomi’s courses include two introductory graduate level courses, one in computational psycholinguistics and one in phonology.

Ellen Lau is a new Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics, specializing in the cognitive neuroscience of language. In her research Ellen uses measures of brain activity such as EEG, MEG, and fMRI to develop better theories of language processing and its neural instantiation. One recent focus of her work is investigating the mechanisms by which readers and listeners use expectations to guide language comprehension. Speakers of a language possess a vast knowledge of deterministic and probabilistic constraints on the input - for example, that an adjective cannot be followed by a verb, that the object of "eat" is likely to name some kind of food, and that a male voice is unlikely to utter the phrase "I'm pregnant". In the face of a signal that is often noisy and ambiguous, proactively using this kind of knowledge to predict the upcoming input may be critical for rapid, accurate, and efficient language processing. Ellen uses the fine-grained temporal and spatial resolution provided by these neuroimaging measures to explore what kinds of linguistic knowledge contribute to expectations in comprehension and how these expectations are implemented in real-time processing.

Dustin Chacón, a first year student, Flagship fellow and Beinecke scholar in the Linguistics department at UMd, has been recently awarded a prestigious NSF-GRFP grant. The grant will be covering his stipend, tuition costs, and cover a bit of funding for travel costs for 3 years.

The project that Colin Phillips and he proposed was to see whether the robustness of applying grammatical coreference constraints in parsing that have been observed in English are due to the properties of those constraints or whether they are due to the way that word order and memory mechanisms interact. He will test this by looking at correlative clause constructions in Hindi in which the same coreference constraints exist, though the relevant phrases come in reverse linear order with respect to their English counterparts.

A student poster presented by Yakov Kronrod (Linguistics), featuring work by Yakov, Chang Hu (CS), Olivia Buzek (CS and Linguistics undergrad), and Alexander J. Quinn (CS), has been named the winning poster in the Math, Technology, and Engineering category at the 2011 American Association for the Advancement of Science, (AAAS) Student Poster Competition. The AAAS is an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world. In addition to organizing membership activities, AAAS publishes the journal Science.

The poster, entitled Using Monolingual Crowds to Improve Translation, reported on work done in the context of a project on crowdsourcing and translation led by Ben Bederson and Philip Resnik, which is supported by NSF and a Google Research Award. The students will be recognized in a spring issue of Science and on the Annual Meeting web site for AAAS, in addition to receiving a cash prize and a subscription to Science.

Particular recognition goes to Yakov for his leadership in creating and presenting the poster, and to all four students for the excellent work represented here and in the project as a whole. Congratulations on this well deserved recognition!