News & Events
Archive
May 2009
Alan Juffs will be giving a plenary address:
Syntactic and Morphological processing failures in L2: issues and solutions
L2 Processing and Parsing. Location: Lubbock, TX, USA. Start
Date: 21-May-2009 - 24-May-2009 http://www.languages.ttu.edu/L2processing/
April 2009
Yinzling (the Undergraduate Linguistics Club) and the Department of
Linguistics are sponsoring a Coffee Break!
When: Wednesday, April 22, 3 PM – 5 PM
Where: Kiva Han at Forbes and Meyran
To subscribe to the Yinzling mailing list, send an email to sorc+yinzling@pitt.edu.
April 17, 2009: Yas Shirai will give an invited talk "Verb semantics and the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology: Universal constraints or contextual effects?" at the Department of Linguistics, California State University, Fresno.
March 2009
March 6, 2009: Alan Juffs will be giving a talk at the Workshop on second
language learning and proficiency development
Eastern Psychological Association Annual Meeting
http://www.easternpsychological.org/
L1 influence, morphological (in)sensitivity and L2 lexical development:
Evidence from production data
March 8, 2009: Yas Shirai will give an invited talk "The science of foreign language learning" for the International Symposium on Brain Functions and Education, Hiroshima University.
March 14 2009: Alan Juffs will be giving a plenary address at the 10th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign entitled:
"Second language processing failures and directions for some solutions."
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/atrembla/gasla10/
March 16, 2009: Yas Shirai will give an invited talk "Lexical and grammatical aspect in language acquisition, processing and disorders" at the Workshop on Language Acquisition and the Brain, Emory University. http://cmbc.emory.edu/events/
Yinzling (the Undergraduate Linguistics Club) and the Department of
Linguistics are sponsoring a Coffee Break!
When: Tuesday, March 24, 3 PM – 5 PM
Where: Kiva Han at Forbes and Meyran
To subscribe to the Yinzling mailing list, send an email to sorc+yinzling@pitt.edu.
March 25, 2009: Yas Shirai will give a plenary talk "Functional approaches to language acquisition: Where linguistics and psychology meet" at the 20th Annual Congress of Japan Society of Developmental Psychology, Japan Women's University, Tokyo.
February 200
Yinzling (the Undergraduate Linguistics Club) and the Department of
Linguistics are sponsoring a Coffee Break! Take a break from your
school work to come meet Linguistics majors, grad students and faculty. Talk
about languages, linguistics and/or the crazy weather…
When: Friday, February 20, 3 PM – 5 PM
Where: Kiva Han at Forbes and Meyran
To subscribe to the Yinzling mailing list, send an email to sorc+yinzling@pitt.edu.
January 2009
Dr. Shelome Gooden and Erin Donnelly will present "Phonetics of Implosives in Jamaican Creole" at the LSA/SPCL meeting in San Francisco, January 8-11, 2009.
The University of Pittsburgh and CMU will host the third Pennsylvania
Applied Linguistics Consortium Meeting on 31 January, 2009
Contact Alan Juffs for a copy of the program and location.
December 2008
Yas Shirai will give an keynote address "The acquisition of tense-aspect
markers by Cantonese-English bilingual children" at the Conference
on Bilingual Acquisition in Early Childhood, Chinese University of Hong
Kong, December 11-12. http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/lin/conference/baec/
November 2008
Wendy Martelle will present a paper "Evolution of Tense and Aspect: A Case Study in Russian” at the The Eighth High Desert Linguistics Society Conference (HDLS-8) (the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, November, 6-8).
Shelome Gooden and Iyabo Osiapem will present a paper "Sentence
Intonation in Black Bermudian English at NWAV 37, Houston TX, November
6-9 2008.
Christina Schoux Casey, Jie Cui, Fawn T. Draucker, and Kristopher J. Geda will present a paper "Untangling /t/: Variation in Suburban Sydney English" at NWAV 37, Houston TX, November 6-9 2008.
October 2008
Zoe Luk will present a paper "Is the acquisition order of grammatical morphemes impervious to L1 knowledge?" (co-authored with Yas Shirai) at the 27th Second Language Research Forum (University of Hawaii at Manoa, October 17-19). This paper has been accepted for publication in Language Learning.
Claire Siskin received the Educator of the Year award for higher education at the Pennsylvania State Modern Language Association Conference on October 17.
September 2008
Multimedia
Showcase
4:00 - 6:00 pm
Thursday, September 25, 2008
G-17 Cathdral of Learning
World Dance Showcase
7:00 - 9:00 pm
Thursday, September 25, 2008
William Pitt Union Ballroom
Sponsored by the Less-Commonly-Taught-Languages
Center (LCTL)
Erin O'Rourke will present on "Dialect differences and the bilingual vowel space in Peruvian Spanish" at the Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonology (LASP) 4 conference at the University of Texas at Austin, September 26-28, 2008.
August 2008
Claire Siskin presented a workshop at the WorldCALL Conference in Fukuoka, Japan. She also co-chaired the Program Committee for this conference.
July 2008
Kristopher Geda will present his paper about the Enregisterment of Gay-Sounding Speech in Non-Gay Media at the fifth International Gender and Language Association Biennial Conference at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand on 4 July 2008.
June 2008
Shelome Gooden will conduct a workshop, "Prosody
in Creole Languages: Acoustic Analyses and Typology," for
the Caribbean Language and
Linguistics Institute at the University of the West Indies, Mona
Campus Jamaica, 30 June - 25 July 2008.
May 2008
Erin O'Rourke will present on "Speech rhythm variation in dialects of Spanish" at the Speech Prosody 2008 conference held this May 6-9 in Campinas, Brazil.
April 2008
Poster Session
3 pm
Friday, April 18
28th Floor
Photos from the Poster Session
Claire Bradin Siskin received the D. Scott Enright Interest Section Service Award at the TESOL Conference in New York on April 4.
March 2008
Marie Young's Gaelic class was recently featured in an article in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review: Language of Love.
Congratulations to Abdesalam Soudi for winning the Outstanding Poster prize at the Grad Expo! His poster will be posted in the dept foyer for your reading/viewing pleasure.
Kimmy Rehak has been awarded both summer and regular FLAS scholarships. She will use the summer money to study abroad in Sweden. Congratulations, Kimmy!
Ben Friedline and Lauren Collister will present a comparison of digital game worlds and Second Life environments as part of the Multimedia in Language Teaching Workshop Series in G-17 CL at 4 pm on March 6.
Claire Siskin will give a paper, "Lessons Learned from the UPOLAI Project," at the NEALLT Conference at Rutgers University on March 1.
Shelome Gooden will give an invited talk, "Authentically Black, bona fide Pittsburgher: a prosodic description of African American womenâs speech in Pittsburgh," at the African American Women's Language Conference at the University of Texas at San Antonio March 6
February 2008
Pascual Masullo will present an invited colloquium, "Complex Prepositions and Motion Verbs (in Spanish)" at Rutgers University on February 1, 2008.
Shelome Gooden will present an invited talk, "Prosody in Afro-American Varieties" at the Language & Cognition Colloquium at Northwestern University on February 18, 2008.
Yasuhiro Shirai will give a lecture, "Is Resultative Meaning More Difficult Than Progressive Meaning in the Acquisition of the Imperfective Aspect öte i-ru in Japanese?" as part of the Asia over Lunch Series in 4130 Posvar Hall at 12 pm on Thursday, February 21.
Alan Juffs will give an invited talk, "Some Opportunities and Challenges in Teaching Vocabulary Using CALL in an Intensive English Program," as part of the Second Language Education Colloquium Series at OISE at the University of Toronto on February 22.
Pascual Masullo will speak on "WH: A Derivational Approach Without Movement " to the Reading and Language Group at 408 LRDC at 9:30 am on Friday, February 29.
November 2007
Yinzling Coffee Break at Kiva Han
2 P M – 4PM November 5, 2007
Kiva Han at Forbes & Meyran
October 2007
On October 1, Derek Chan will give an oral report. "Using visual speech for training Chinese pronunciation: an in-vivo experiment," at SLaTE 2007 in Farmington, PA. In this PSLC project, Dr. Charles Perfetti and colleagues conducted an experiment on how technology could support and enhance language learning. http://tinyurl.com/ynvgep
Pat Littell will be a guest speaker in the Multimedia in Language Learning Workshop Series in the Robert Henderson Language Media Center, G-17 CL, at 4:00 pm on October 11. He will demonstrate an exercise for learning Quechua in “Using iQuiz for Language Learning on the iPod.”
Alan Juffs and Guillermo Rodríguez will present a paper, "Working memory in context: Differential effects on comprehension of relative clauses and anaphor binding," at the Second Language Research Forum on October 13, 2007.
September 2007
Multimedia
Showcase
Robert Henderson Language Media Center
G-17 Cathedral of Learning
4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Lecture--Cross Cultural Communication (Description)
4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
September 27, 2007
William Pitt Union- Dining Room A
Jeannette South-Paul and Soudi Abdesalam
On Friday 14th September, Patti Spinner and Alan Juffs will present
a paper entitled "ESL placement tests based on morphosyntactic development:
can it be done?" at Eurosla 2007 in Newcastle, UK
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/niassh/eurosla17/
On September 21, Derek Chan will present a paper, "Reduplication with phonological fixed segmentism – the Emergence of the Unmarked tone in Cantonese" at LingO 2007 in Oxford, UK. http://www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/events/lingo/programme.htm
July-August 2007: Yas Shirai gave three plenary talks in Japan, including "Lexical and grammatical aspect in language acquisition, processing, and disorders" at International Workshop on Mental Architecture for Processing and Learning of Language (MAPLL 2007) held at Hiroshima University. http://home.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~cbl/MAPLL2007/
Yas Shirai has been elected President of the Japanese Society
for Language Sciences.
http://www.cyber.sist.chukyo-u.ac.jp/JSLS/index.html
August 2007
In August, Prof. Shelome Gooden was an invited speaker for the "Intonational Phonology: Understudied or Fieldwork Languages" Workshop held August 6-10, 2007 in conjunction with the International Congress of Phonetics Sciences in Saarbrücken, Germany. The title of her paper is “Intonational Phonology of Jamaican Creole”.
Prof. Erin O'Rourke also presented a paper entitled “Intonation in Quechua: Questions and Analysis” during the same workshop.
Congratulations to the American
Linguistics Olympiad Team,
who won the international competition. Special kudos and thanks to Lori
Levin who was instrumental in both the local and national organization!
Abdesalam Soudi will give a talk, "Effective Personnel Management," at 2 pm on August 8, 2007, Wyndham Garden Hotel, 3454 Forbes Avenue. The co-presenters are Freida Williams, Carnegie Mellon University, and Dr. John Wilds, University of Pittsburgh. More information at http://www.oaklandtaskforce.org/documents/OBID%20postcards_rev.pdf
July 2007
Shelome Gooden will teach a course, LSA.375, "Theoretical and Applied
Issues in the Study of Pidgins and Creoles" at the LSA
Institute at
Stanford University in July.
Claire Bradin Siskin will give plenary talks and workshops at the 32nd Annual TEFL Conference in São Paulo and at the Casa Thomas Jefferson Seminar in Brasilia in July.
June 2007
Presentations:
Benjamin Hoffiz
Tuesday, June 5, 10:00 AM, CL 335
Title: Diglossia: Arabic as a Standard Language and its Dialects (Abstract)
May 2007
Linguistics major Varia Permyashkin has been profiled in the Pitt Chronicle: http://www.chronicle.pitt.edu/?p=152
MA student Alaina Farabaugh has been awarded a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship to study Arabic in Amman, Jordan during summer 2007. Congratulations, Alaina!
Graduate Student Poster Session Photos
PhD student Veronica Lifrieri won the award for best paper for her presentation, "Globalization in Argentina: Constructing language and national identity in a language policy," which she recently presented at the 2007 Georgetown Linguistics Society Conference at Georgetown University, Washington DC. Congratulations, Veronica!
Presentations:
Olla Al-Shalchi
Thursday, May 24, 10:00 AM, CL 349
Title: The Development of the Arabic Alphabet (Abstract)
Amani Attia
Wednesday, May 30, 10:00 AM, CL 321
Title: More Commonly Asked Questions in the Arabic Classroom (Abstract)
April 2007
Graduate Student Poster Session
3:00 - 5:00 pm
Friday, April 20
Graduate Student Poster Session Photos
Pascual Masullo will present a colloquium, "Restructuring verbs and clitic positioning," at Pennsylvania State University on April 16.
Claire Bradin Siskin, Elizabeth Wylie-Ernst of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Beatrice DeAngelis and Sarah Williams of the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, and Brett Wells of the Department of French and Italian Languages and Literatures have received an Innovation in Education Award from the Advisory Council on Instructional Excellence for 2007-2008. Their project is "A Tool for Assessing Oral Proficiency in Foreign Languages."
Claire Bradin Siskin presented a paper, "A Lab Director’s Perspective on Assessing Speaking Proficiency" at the NEALLT Conference at Cornell University on April 1.
Friday, March 30 , 2007
3:00 p.m
Room 144 Cathedral of Learning
Professor Kirk Hazen
West Virginia University
“An Empirical View of Varieties of English in Appalachia" Abstract
March 2007
Pascual Masullo has been appointed Premier Judge for the 2006 "H. E. Francis Literary Competition", sponsored by the Ruth Hindman Foundation and the University of Alabama in Huntsville English Department.
Dawn McCormick and Dorolyn Smith will present an LDCP Workshop,
"Fundraising and Writing Grant Proposals," at the International TESOL
Conference, Wednesday, March 21 (10:30 am-12 pm) - Washington State Convention
and Trade Center (Room 213).
Dawn McCormick, Christine O'Neill, Lois Wilson, Alan Juffs and Dorolyn Smith will present Talk #2256: "Conducting Research Within Intensive English Programs" at International TESOL in Seattle, March 22, 2007. http://www.eshow2000.com/tesol/2007/conference_program.cfm
Claire Bradin Siskin will present "Misconceptions, myths, and
metaphors in CALL research" as part of the CALL Interest Section's
Academic Session at International TESOL in Seattle, March 22, 2007.
March 15–18, 2007: The Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages XXXVII will be hosted by the Department of Linguistics.
Colloquium Series
Friday, March 2, 2007
3:00 p.m
Room 144 Cathedral of Learning
Professor Sharon Hargus
University of Washington (Seattle)
"Sahaptin Relational Nouns" Abstract
Alan Juffs will be the invited keynote speaker at SLAT Interdisciplinary Roundtable, University of Arizona on March 2, 2007. His talk will be entitled: "Vocabulary acquisition in a English as second language: refining theory and practice in an Intensive English Program."
February 2007
February 8: The Study Abroad Office at the University of Pittsburgh
invites you to the 2007 Spring International Studies Fair. The aim of
our Fair is to host both student and professional organizations dedicated
to promoting cross-cultural awareness. The 2007 Spring Fair will be held
on Thursday, 8 February from 10:00 am until 4:00 pm. We will be in the
Assembly Room and Ballroom of the William Pitt Union.
The Linguistics Department will be represented by the Less-Commonly-Taught
Languages Center, the Deaf Awareness Society and the English Language
Institute.
Claire Siskin will speak via video webcast as part of Pitt's Instructional Technology mCast Series at 12:30 pm on February 15. Her topic will be "Podcasts for Language Learning."
January 2007
Arabic instructor Ethan Pullman has been featured in the "On Teaching" section of the University Times.
Shelome Gooden and Maeve Eberhardt will present a paper, " AAVE in Pittsburgh: Ethnicity, Local Identity and Local Speech," at the American Dialect Society in Anaheim, CA on January 5.
Alan Juffs and Guillermo Rodríguez will present a paper, "Using Only Word Class: Evidence against shallow parsing in second language processing," at the Linguistic Society of America conference.
December 2006
Yas Shirai will give two invited talks at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo on December 14 and 20 ("The acquisition of regular and irregular past tense forms in L1 and L2 English" and "Grammaticization of imperfective aspect."
November 2006
Award Winning Arabic Instructor
Ethan Pullman recently received an award for Outstanding Teaching from
Fraternity and Sorority Life. Ethan has been teaching Arabic in the
Less-Commonly-Taught Languages Center since 2001 and has often received
rave reviews from his students. This award is yet another indication
of his dedication to his students and his commitment to teaching excellence.
Lisa Smith, an undergraduate student in the Department, will present "Dahntahn" Champs: Identifying with the Winning Steelers and Speaking "Pittsburghese" (Abstract) at the New Ways of Analyzing Variation Conference, in Columbus, Ohio, November 9-12.
Scott Kiesling, Shelome Gooden, and Maeve Eberhardt will speak at the
same conference.
Scott Kiesling will speak at the Wisconsin
Council of Teachers of
English Language Arts Conference on November 3.
Pascual José Masullo will present a colloquium on his current research at Ohio State University, Columbus, on November 3rd. His presentation, which deals on the Syntax-Semantics Interface, is titled "Covert Exclamatives in Spanish".
Alan Juffs and Guillermo Rodríguez will give a workshop, "Comparing Effects of Individual Cognitive Differences on L2 English in College-educated and Low-educated Learners of English as a Second Language," at the Low Educated Second Language and Literacy Acquisition (LESLLA) for Adults (LESLLA) Forum at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA on November 2.
October 2006
Wednesday October 18, 2006
3:00 p.m
Room 144 Cathedral of Learning
Pascual José Masullo
Department of Linguistis
University of Pittsburgh"The Syntax-Lexical Semantics Interface: Prepositionalizing Motion Verbs in Spanish"
Abstract (pdf file)
Erin O'Rourke will present a paper entitled "Correlating
speech rhythm in
dialects of Spanish" at the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium to be
held
October 19-22, 2006 at the University of Western Ontario.
Pascual Masullo will present a paper entitled "One
more note on parasitic gaps in Spanish" at the Hispanic Linguistics
Symposium to be held
October 19-22, 2006 at the University of Western Ontario.
Yasuhiro Shirai will give an invited plenary talk, "Second language acquisition research and Japanese language education: From theory to practice" at the 7th International Symposium on Japanese Language Education and Japanese Studies, October 29-30, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Scott Kiesling will present a paper entitled “Whose social meaning?
Indexicality and dialect in Pittsburgh” in 1700 WWPH at 3 pm on
October 27.
Abstract (pdf file)
Alan Juffs will give a workshop and plenary, "Toward the Integrating Theories of SLA," in Taiwan on October 27, at the 2006 Chia Nan International Conference on Language Teaching. Workshops are sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Taiwan and hosted by the Department of Applied Foreign Languages, Chia Nan University, Tainan.
Claire Bradin Siskin will conduct a workshop, "Sound Advice: A Digital Audio Primer for Language Teachers," at the Pennsylvania State Modern Language Association in Erie, PA.
September 2006
Colloquium Series
The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics: Volume 2, Japanese, co-edited by Yasuhiro Shirai, has just been published by Cambridge University Press.
Colloquium Series
Wednesday September 27, 2006
3:00 p.m
Room 144 Cathedral of Learning
David Mortensen
“A Marked Structure is Born: The Emergence of Obstruents
and the Motivations for Sound Change” Abstract
September 24-20 International
Week
September 27 Multimedia
Showcase
Alan Juffs will be an invited speaker at EUROSLA 2006 in Antalya, Turkey, on September 13, 2006. He and Guillermo Rodríguez will deliver a paper, "Second language sentence processing and working memory in college-educated and low-educated learners of English as a second language."
June 2006
Scott Kiesling has been appointed chair of the Department of Linguistics, effective September 1, 2006
April 21, 2006
Graduate Student Poster Session, 28th floor, Cathedral of Learning, 3–5 p.m.