The Syntax-Semantics Group is holding its first meeting of Fall 2025 on Tuesday, September 2, at 3-4pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department (1085 Av Docteur-Penfield). Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/bQ4IXlJxTTShVcMHOosNtQ In the meeting, there will be informal group introductions, and the group will create a presentation schedule for the semester. All interested […]

This summer, several McGill students and professors organized workshops in collaboration with Kanien’kehá:ka organizations Ionkwahronka’onhátie and the Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center (KORLCC). On June 12th, 19th, and 26th, Simon LiVolsi, Akwiratékha’ Martin, and Heather Goad led Praat workshops in Kahnawà:ke in collaboration with teachers and adult immersion program students at KORLCC.  On July 8th, Anne Bertrand, Sophia Flaim, and Jessica Coon led an ELAN and Audacity […]

Alessio Tosolini presented a poster at the Special Interest Group on Typology at the Association for Computational Linguistics in Vienna titled “Analyzing the Linguistic Priors of Language Models with Synthetic Languages“. Congrats, Alessio!

Laurestine Bradford presented a poster titled “Aspectual classes as lexically-conditioned predictors of aspectual choice” at the SCiL (Society for Computation in Linguistics) 2025 meeting on July 18th-20th. The meeting was hosted by Wellesley College but held in Eugene, Oregon, co-located with the LSA Summer Institute.

Ada Tur (CS + Linguistics McGill undergraduate) and Gaurav Kamath presented their work entitled “Language Models Largely Exhibit Human-like Constituent Ordering Preferences” at the 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2025).  The paper received a Senior Area Chair award at the conference, and can […]

Congratulations to Xuanda Chen, who successfully defended his dissertation, “Linguistic Experience and the Representation of Phonological Features: Perception, Processing, and Second Language Acquisition,” on August 5th!

On August 8th, Connie Ting successfully defended her dissertation, “Investigating Cross-linguistic Patterns of Intrinsic F0 Effects in Production and Perception.” Congratulations, Connie!

Brendan Gillon travelled to Japan for the last two weeks of April. He made three stops there: first in Tachikawa, a satellite city Tokyo; second in Kyoto; and third in Kobe. In Tachikawa, he gave a talk to Prof. Yusuke Kubata’s research group at the National Institute for Japanese language and Linguistics, in Tachikawa. The […]

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.