Spotlight: PhD Degrees Awarded
The linguistics department welcomes eight graduate students who received their PhDs on April 29, 2012. Congratulations!
Spotlight: Foreign Language Class
LCTL (Less-Commonly-Taught Languages Center) offers many foreign language classes. Shown is instructor Marie Young teaching Irish Gaelic in a Nationality Room.
Spotlight: Phonetics Lab
The Phonetics Lab, lead by Dr. Marta Ortega, is a place where graduate and undergrad students run phonetics experiments.
Spotlight: Graduate Student Advising
The linguistics department faculty work closely with their graduate students. In this photo, Dr. Scott Kiesling advises Katherine I. Martin.
News & Events
• Check this Calendar for upcoming events.
• Current Weekly Colloquium Series schedule can be found on this page.
New Graduates
(May 2, 2012) Congratulations to our new graduates, which include over thirty undergrads and thirteen graduate students. The linguistics faculty especially welcome eight new PhD's: Roberto Aranovich, Carrie Bonilla, Brian Brubaker, Benjamin Friedline, Chan (Derek) Ho Leung, Pei Sui (Zoe) Luk, Wendy Martelle, and Mary Lou Vercellotti.
Robert T. Henderson Award
(April 16, 2012) Congratulations to Bill Price, this year's winner of Robert T. Henderson Endowment Fund Award. Please join the department and the Henderson family for the award reception at 2:30pm on April 16 (Mon) at RHLMC.
Department to Co-Host SLRF 2012
(April 12, 2012) The department will be co-hosting this year's SLRF (Second Language Research Forum) on October 18-21, 2012. SLRF 2012 is organized by graduate students and faculty from many institutions around Pittsburgh: the Department of Linguistics, the Department of Psychology and Instruction and Learning at Pitt, as well as the Department of Modern Languages at CMU. We hope to see you all in Pittsburgh in October.
Freshman Wins Brackenridge Research Fellowship
(April 11, 2012) Congratulations to Maddie Little, Freshman at the University of Pittsburgh, who has been awarded a Brackenridge Summer Research Fellowship (2012) by the University Honors College to work on a Sociolinguistics project: the impact of computers on physician-patient conversation (Faculty Sponsor: Abdesalam Soudi).
Faculty Receives Student’s Choice Award
(April 5, 2012) Congratulations to
Grad Student Wins a Teaching Award
(April 3, 2012) The linguistics department congratulates Lauren Collister on her receipt of the A&S GSO Elizabeth Baranger Excellence in Teaching Award. Lauren is one of 7 winners selected from an initial pool of more than 100 nominees. The award celebrates the outstanding work of graduate student teachers for the past academic year.
Grad Student Wins Outstanding Presentation Award
(March 22, 2012) Holman Tse, a Ph.D. student in linguistics, won an Outstanding Prsentation Award at this year's Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Grad Expo. His paper was entitled "Consonant and Tone Interaction in Cantonese".
Ling Major wins LearnLab Summer Internship
(March 12, 2012) Joseph Petrich, a linguistics sophomore, has won a LearnLab Summer Internship. He will work with Dr. Alan Juffs and Dr. Na-Rae Han on analyzing ELI student essays using NLP (natural language processing) technologies.
Presentation at GURT 2012
(March 6, 2012) Alan Juffs and Guillermo Rodríguez will present a paper at Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2012 (GURT 2012) entitled "The Processing of relative clauses by spanish-speaking learners of English as a second language".
LCTL Instructor Wins a Grant
(March 5, 2012) Irish Gaelic instructor Marie Young recently received a course development grant from Pitt’s European Union Center of Excellence and European Studies Center. She will use the funds to develop a new course, Language and Traditions in Contemporary Irish Culture.
Promoting Advanced Language Proficiency and Intercultural Competency in LCTLs
Abdesalam Soudi and Claude Mauk will present a paper on “3D Second Life Communities: Teaching real languages in virtual lands” at the 15th Annual National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages on April 26-29, 2012 in Madison, WI.
Presentation at Pragmatics Festival
Abdesalam Soudi , Jeannette South-Paul (Andrew W. Mathieson UPMC Professor of Medicine and Chair) and Lauren Hasek will present a paper titled "Delicate matters in the exam room" at the Pragmatics Festival at Indiana University, Bloomington on April 19-21, 2012.
Plenary Address by Dr. Juffs
Dr. Alan Juffs will give an invited plenary address entitled "Problems and interventions in second language morphological processing" at the Michigan State University’s Annual Linguistics Symposium on February 24, 2012.
A Book Chapter on Sociolinguistics in Games
Benjamin Friedline and Lauren Collister have a chapter titled "Constructing a Powerful Identity in World of Warcraft: A Sociolinguistic Approach to MMORPGs" in the newly-published anthology from Continuum, Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens: The Digital Role-Playing Game.
Invited Talk by Dr. Shirai
Dr. Yasuhiro Shirai will give an invited talk at the Institute for Japanese Studies at Ohio State University on the topic "Second Language Acquisition Research and Second Language Instruction: A Functional Approach" on February 15.
Upcoming Presentation by a Graduate Student
Ph.D. student Nausica Marcos Miguel will be presenting a poster at the 15th International Morphology Meeting, February 9-12. The title is "An Analysis of Spanish Verb-Noun Compounds' Tolerance to Diminutives."
Upcoming Presentations for Graduate Student
Graduate student Holman Tse will present his paper on "Lexical Tone Vs F0 Effects on VOT in Cantonese" at this Friday's colloquium. He will also be presenting on this topic at the Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics at Ohio State University on March 16, 2012 and at the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Grad Expo on March 22, 2012.
