UConn Linguistics at BUCLD

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The 50th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD50) is taking place on November 6-9th 2025. UConn linguistics is going to be well represented at the conference, including a symposium led by William Snyder, with Jill de Villiers, Tom Roeper, and Virginia Valian:

  • Language acquisition and generative grammar: The past 50 years

… and with talks by:

  • Shuyan Wang (PhD 2022, now a post-doc at UConn), Chui Yi Lee, Diane Lillo-Martin, and Deborah Chen Pichler (PhD 2001, now at Gallaudet University). Development of syntax in spoken English by bimodal bilingual deaf children with cochlear implants: Comparison with hearing bilinguals and monolinguals
  • Ruthe Foushee, Zena Levan, Jess Breeze, Jenny Lu, Diane Lillo-Martin, and Susan Goldin-Meadow. Communication in the absence of a shared conventional language: Contingent nonverbal behavior scaffolds language development and drives communication with deaf and hearing children
  • Linghui Gan, Angelica Llerena and Diane Lillo-Martin.What does bimodal bilingual acquisition look like in deaf children with hearing parents?
  • Bonnie Barrett, Kaj Kraus, Shane Blau, Martin Dale-Hench, Deborah Chen Pichler and Diane Lillo-Martin. Implementing a language-specific subscore for more informative ASL syntax assessment for hearing parents and their DHH children
  • Ting Xu (PhD 2016, now at Tsinghua University), Li-Chen Chuang, Mingming Liu and Stella Christie. Children’s acquisition of the felicity condition of Mandarin ‘dou’ 

… and posters by:

  • Kosta Boskovic (class of 2024, now a PhD candidate in psychology at UC San Diego) and David Barner. Children’s quantification of time: a case study of the comparative “more”
  • Irene Canudas Grabolosa, Hanna-Sophia Georgievska Shine, Jesse C. Snedeker, Marie Coppola, and Annemarie Kocab. Agent and Patient Categories in English-Speaking Children and Homesigners
  • Ece Eroğlu and Kadir Gökgöz (post-doc 2013-16, now at Bogazici University). A Referential System in Space: Age of Acquisition Effects in TİD Pointing Signs
  • Yangyu Sun, Chiara Dal Farra, Aurore Gonzalez, Johannes Hein, Johnson F. Ilori, Tamar Makharoblidze, Chiara Saponaro, Kazuko Yatsushiro (PhD 1999, now at ZAS Berlin), Uli Sauerland and Maria Teresa Guasti. A comparison of children’s relative clause production in Georgian, Italian and Yoruba 
  • Yixuan Yan. John knows Mary likes what: Learning attitude verbs by speech acts in a wh-in-situ language 
  • Adina Camelia Bleotu, Anton Benz, Deborah Foucault, Lyn Tieu (PhD 2013, now at University of Toronto), and Tom Roeper. Acquiring conditional disjunction: Romanian five-year-olds’ struggle with implicit ‘if not’
  • Giulio Ciferri Muramatsu and Zixi Liu. A Snapshot of (Really) Early CP Occurrence: Sentence Final Particles in Child Japanese
  • Andre Eliatamby and Lyn Tieu. Children compute more ad-hoc implicatures from “a” than “the”: On the interaction of definiteness and ad-hoc implicatures
  • Kaj Kraus, Bonnie Barrett, Shane Blau, Martin Dale-Hench, Mary Cecilia Conte, Diane Lillo-Martin, Elaine Gale, and Deborah Chen Pichler. Relationships between L2 hearing parent and L1 deaf child learning of ASL: Vocabulary and syntax 
  • Pravaal Yadav. Children are conservative in their production: A study of long-distance questions in child-Hindi 
  • Alyssa Vorobey and Lyn Tieu. Information packaging in child language: Comparing asserted to presupposed and implicated information
  • Maria Astapova and Lyn Tieu. On children’s acquisition of disjunction in French: A corpus study
  • Lyn Tieu and Petra Schulz. Understanding sentences with focus particles using visual alternatives: Children do not ignore “only”

In addition, Yixuan (Pepper) Yan was also awarded the Paula Menyuk Award for top-rated abstracts by student first authors for the second year in a row! Congratulations!

 

UConn Linguistics at LAWNE

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The annual Language Acquisition Workshop of New England (LAWNE) took place on October 25th, hosted by Yale University. Several UConn PhD students presented at the workshop:

    • Yitong Luo and Yixuan Yan. Acquiring two disjunctive morphemes in Mandarin-speaking Children: A preliminary study
    • Zixi Liu. Are those in-tree-guingly early Mandarin SFPs adult-like?
    • Giulio Ciferri Muramatsu. Yet another study on the acquisition of Japanese Disjunction
    • Pravaal Yadav. Overuse of Wh-Scope Marking in Child Hindi: An Investigation of Long-Distance Questions 

     

      UConn Linguists at NELS

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      The 56th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society took place at New York University, October 17-19th. UConn Linguistics was represented at the conference with several poster presentations:
        • Tarcisio Dias. Compounding composite size morphemes
        • Christos Christopoulos (PhD 2022, now at Masaryk University). Gaps in Modern Greek verbalization
        • Giulio Ciferri Muramatsu and Pravaal Yadav. Kind Denoting Disjunction 
        • Ting Xu (PhD 2016, now at Tsinghua University), Li-Chen Chuang, Mingming Liu, and Stella Christie. From truth to felicity: children’s acquisition of the pragmatics of Mandarin dou 

        Here’s also a photo of some of the UConn linguists, past and present, at the conference:

        Kanta Tateno | New Student

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        Hi, my name is Kanta Tateno, and I’m from Fukuoka, Japan. Before coming to UConn, I worked on topics in semantics and pragmatics, focusing on how focus affects interpretation. This project led me to think more broadly about meaning in context, and I am excited to continue exploring different perspectives within semantics, pragmatics, and discourse as a PhD student here.

        Outside of academics, I enjoy watching sports (especially American football), programming and watching dramas. I look forward to meeting everyone and being part of the UConn community!

        Will Rimer | New Student

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        Hi! I’m Will Rimer [ˈɹɑɪ̯.mə], and I’m from the South West of England. I did my BA at Downing College, Cambridge, and my MLitt at Newcastle University – both degrees were in linguistics, and for both dissertations I worked on syntax. In particular, I investigated the crosslinguistic possibilities of null pronouns, using Ian Roberts’ formal-feature-based parameter hierarchies. Despite this focus, I’m always reluctant to be pigeonholed as ‘just’ a syntactician (or ‘just’ a linguist, for that matter). My other interests in linguistics include phonology, typology, historical linguistics, language evolution, linguistic complexity, and the indigenous languages of North America. Since coming to UConn, I have also developed an interest in semantics and logic, which tie in with two of my main academic interests outside linguistics, namely maths (with an s!) and philosophy.

        When I’m not studying or working as a teaching assistant, I like working out and bodybuilding (running, calisthenics and lifting), playing (and designing!) board games and video games, cooking, reading, and spending as much time as I can with the people I love. I’m very easy to spot on campus: I’m the only person who wears a full suit and tie, and I’m always sporting a dashing moustache – do say hello if you see me out and about, because I love meeting new people 🙂

        Roman Pasquill | New Student

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        線路沿ひ　声や紅き葉　星に落つ

        Beside the railbed
        A weary voice – crimson leaf
        Falls into the stars.

        Salutations, I am Roman Pasquill, hailing from Schenectady on the Macquaa Kill. At Albany, where I spent my youth in university, I studied the art of linguistics and anthropology, before taking a tryst with the teaching of English as a second tongue. From there I found myself six years lost far-far east, in the land of the Ainu among the Japanese. The things that draw me to the puzzling patterns of language are the same that pull me to dance, to sing, to hear a bit of Pushkin in a baseball game. Perhaps this explains my particular fondness for the phonology of rhythm, pitch, and prosody – the music imbued in even the most mundane speech. Out in the world, you may find me at the piano, tuning a bike wheel, or casting a verse along old rails.

        Ryuta Ono | New Student

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        My name is Ryuta Ono. I was born and raised in Osaka, Japan, and spent much of my time in Kyoto, where I completed both my B.A. and M.A. at Doshisha University. My interests lie in syntax, phonology, and the interface between the two. I am especially interested in agreement, case marking, prosody, ellipsis, dialectal variation, and minimalist theory.

        Outside of linguistics, I enjoy watching old movies, listening to music (especially AOR, Bossa Nova, country music, and classic Japanese pop), reading novels, drinking beer, taking photos, and traveling, sometimes all at once.

        Jaewon Oh | New Student

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        Hi, my name is Jaewon Oh, and I am from Korea. I received both my BA and MA degrees from the Department of Linguistics at Seoul National University. My research interests lie in formal semantics and the interface between semantics and pragmatics. I am interested in topics such as modality, questions, conditionals, implicature, scalarity, and focus-alternatives. What motivates me most as a linguist is intriguing analogies and puzzles in distributional patterns and the way meaning is enriched beyond the literal meaning. Besides my academic life, I am a big fan of Moomin and love crocheting (For me, it’s a kind of meditation, an outlet of creativity, and a satisfying way to feel productive).

        Eli Herbst | New Student

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        Hi, my name is Eli Herbst. I am from Princeton, New Jersey. I got my BS in Mathematics, with a minor in Linguistics, from the University of Maryland in 2024. I discovered the field of linguistics when I took the introductory class at Maryland as an elective, and by the end of that semester I had already declared a Linguistics minor. I was fascinated to see that a lot of what I learned in mathematics could be applied to the study of language. I am very excited to continue pursuing linguistics at UConn!

        My main research interest is first language acquisition, but I am also interested in semantics and syntax. I am currently working on a project inspecting the acquisition of relational nominals and their reciprocity.

        Outside of academics, I enjoy games, puzzles, and sports.

        UConn Linguistics at SuB

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        Sinn und Bedeutung 30 will take place at Goethe University Frankfurt, September 23-27, 2024. UConn linguistics will be well represented at the conference, with an invited talk by:

        • Magdalena Kaufmann. Perspectives on possibility modals

        … and talks by:

        • Yuta Tatsumi (PhD 2021, now at Meikai University). Temporal connectives and measure phrases in Japanese
        • Mingjiang Chen. A Causal Model Approach to the Agent Control Hypothesis
        • Yixuan Yan and Yitong Luo. Declarative but not inquisitive disjunctors derive conjunctive inference in child language: What to flatten?
        • Adina Camelia Bleotu, Lyn Tieu (PhD 2013, now at University of Toronto), Gabriela Bîlbîie, Mara Panaitescu, Anton Benz, and Andreea Nicolae.Comparing disjunction across polarities: The source of strong interpretations of negative disjunctive sentences in child language is scope, not strengthening
        • Yusuke Yagi (PhD 2025, now at Waseda University) and Ka-Fai Yip. Asymmetric reconstruction for binding but not for scope

          … and poster presentations by:

          • Jon Gajewski. A source-based ambiguity in the semantics of believe
          • Xuetong Yuan (PhD 2024, now at University of Chicago). Conditionality without if: conditional marking strategies in Mandarin

           

          Photo: Most of the UConn contingent at SuB 30.