Supported by the Graduate Mobility Award, Alex Zhai spent the summer at The University of Tokyo. She participated in Professor Yuki Hirose and Professor Manami Hirayama’s labs, presented at the Tokyo Circle of Phonologists workshop, and collected data from Japanese participants.

McLing would like to welcome Josh Lee to the Linguistics department! Josh is a postdoctoral researcher working with Morgan Sonderegger and Meghan Clayards. Seung Suk (Josh) Lee (he/him) works on corpus phonetics, prosody, and computational phonology. His main interest is studying how segmental realization is conditioned by prosodic structure in production and how it serves as a […]

A paper by Michaela Socolof (PhD ’24), Timothy O’Donnell, and Michael Wagner, “The idiom processing advantage is explained by surprisal,” recently appeared in Cognitive Science. Abstract: It has been repeatedly found that idioms are processed faster than syntactically matched literal phrases, in both comprehension and production. This has led to debate about whether idioms are […]

PhD student Kuilin Li presented a poster titled “Cue Weighting in Mandarin Sibilant Perception & Imitation by Native Mandarin Speakers & Naïve English Speakers” at the 6th Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE) conference, held June 25–27, 2025. The event took place at the University of the Balearic Islands in Mallorca, Spain.

Some of the final projects from last semester’s LING315: Languages of the World (taught by PhD student Willie Myers) can be seen here. In the class, each student works with the grammar of an endangered language to learn about its phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. This semester’s final projects included:

McLing is pleased to welcome this year’s incoming group of graduate students! (In no particular order!) Emma Custer Emma Custer (she/her) is passionate about syntax and fieldwork, with a particular interest in argument structure in West African languages. She earned her B.A. in Linguistics from McGill University. Outside of linguistics, she enjoys cooking, playing the flute, […]

Vera Yunxiao Xia (BA 2018) and Lydia White presented a paper at the conference of the European Second Language Association (EUROSLA 34), at the Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, June 25-28th 2025, on Intervention effects in L2 object relative clauses.