2007

November 2007

• Ph.D. student Manami Sato made a presentation, 'Incremental construction and spontaneous revision of mental imagery in Japanese sentence comprehension,' at The 17th Japanese/Korean Linguistics conference, held at UCLA. This is the leading conference in the world on Japanese and Korean, with an acceptance rate for abstracts of about 25%. Manami's paper will be published in the conference proceedings.
• William O’Grady gave this year’s invited plenary talk at the Boston University Conference on Child Language Development (BUCLD). His talk, entitled ‘Does emergentism have a chance?,’ reflected his current thinking on the viability of a processor-based emergentist theory of language acquisition. The text of the talk will be published in the BUCLD Proceedings and is available at William’s website.
• Four of our graduate students (Jun Nomura, So-Young Kim, Hye-Young Kwak, and Junghee Kim) made presentations at the just completed Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD). This is the world’s most important annual conference on language acquisition and also the most selective—the rejection rate for abstracts is close to 75%. Yet,our department had more graduate students making presentations than any other department in the world!
• Four students from our department made presentations at the Japanese-Korean Linguistics (JKL) Conference held at UCLA this month — Manami Sato, So-Young Kim, recent M.A. graduate Jaehoon Jeong, and Kyuseek Hwang (with Amy Schafer and William O’Grady as co-authors) all traveled to Los Angeles to participate in this highly selective conference.
• Ben Bergen's co-edited Cognitive Linguistics Reader has just been published by. The Equinox Press. Over 990 pages long, it provides an annotated compilation of key articles in Cognitive Linguistics.
• Kamil Ud Deen was invited to write a chapter for the Handbook of Child Language, published by Cambridge University Press. This prestigious publication contains 26 chapters written by leading figures in the field, and is anticipated to be released on December 15, 2008.

October 2007

• Ben Bergen's co-authored paper (with Shane Lindsay, Teenie Matlock, andSrini Narayanan), entitled 'Spatial and linguistic aspects of visual imagery in sentence comprehension,' has been published in Cognitive Science.
• Kamil Ud Deen was appointed Associate Editor for the Journal of Child Language. JCL, published by Cambridge University Press, is the premier journal in the field of child language acquisition. It has the highest impact factor of any other journal in child language; it publishes over 40 articles (research and notes) per year, and plans to expand this number in the coming years.

July 2007

• Ph.D. student Valerie Guerin presented a paper 'Discovering Mavea, an endangered language spoken in Vanuatu,' at the 7th international conference on Oceanic linguistics (COOL7) held in Noumea, New Caledonia
• Ben Bergen presented an invited plenary lecture on 'The dynamics of language learning' at the International School on Complexity in Erice, Italy.
• Ben Bergen presented an invited lecture ('Construction Grammar: Design features') at the International Summer Atelier on Modeling Language Evolution with Computational Construction Grammar, in Erice, Italy.

June 2007

• A new journal Language Documentation and Conservation (LD&C) is launched under the editorship of Ken Rehg. LD&C is a fully refereed, open-access journal sponsored by the University of Hawai‘i Press.
• Ben Bergen gave the invited talk International Summer Atelier: Modeling Language Evolution with Computational Construction Grammar. Erice, Italy
• Ann Peters traveled to Finland to serve as the Opponent in the public debate of Lea Nieminen's doctoral thesis.
• Ben Bergen's article, 'Experimental methods for simulation semantics' has appeared in Methods in Cognitive Linguistics.

May 2007

• Ph.D. student Valerie Guerin has published a paper, 'Definiteness and specificity in Mavea,' in Oceanic Linguistics 46(2):538-553.Ph.D. student Valerie Guerin has published a paper 'A review of Lexique Pro,' co-authored with Sebastien Lacrampe in Language Documentation and Conservation 2:293-300.
• William O’Grady gave the invited keynote speech at the Malaysia International Conference on Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (MICOLLAC) in Selangor, Malaysia. His talk, available at his website, is entitled ‘Interpreting experience: Clues from the study of language acquisition.’ The conference brought together several hundred scholars from the Middle East and southeast Asia.
• Hyekyung Hwang successfully defended her dissertation "Prosodic phrasing in sentence comprehension: Evidence fromnative English speakers and native Korean-speaking second language learners of English." She has accepted a postdoctoral position in the Centre forResearch on Language, Mind and Brain at McGill University.
• Ph.D. student Yukie Hara is one of two winners of the presitigious Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship, first established in 1959 to commemorate the wedding of Crown Prince Akihito [the present Emperor] and Crown Princess Michiko [the present Empress]. A total of 125 scholarships have been awarded since 1973."

 April 2007

• Professor Emeritus Ann Peters was the invited speaker at the UW-Milwaukee Symposium on formulaic language.
• Ph.D. students Aya Inoue and Toshiaki Furukawa made a presentation at the International Society for Language Studies(ISLS) conference, which was held in Hawaii this year.
• Professor Andrew Wong and Ph.D. student Aya Inoue presented a paper at the Symposium About Language and Society - Austin(SALSA XV), held at the University of Texas at Austin. SALSA regularly attracts leading scholars in the field of sociolinguistics for its annual meeting.
• Ben Bergen presented an invited talk ('Mental simulation and grammar') at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA.

 March 2007

• This year UH sent seven presenters to the Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, the leading and most selective forum for sentence processing research. Two of the projects were presented by graduate students in the Department of Second Language Studies, whose research was supervised by our Amy Schafer. Five were authored by graduate students and faculty in linguistics: Heeyeon Dennison, Hyekyung Hwang, Kyuseek Hwang, Jung-Hee Kim Manami Sato, Benjamin Bergen and Amy Schafer. There were more presenters at this year’s CUNYconference from our department than form any other department in the world.

February 2007

• Ph.D. student Aya Inoue and Jake Terrell each made presentations this month at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS33).

January 2007

• Ben Bergen gave the invited talk 'Narrative comprehension and the construction of mental scenes.' Departmental colloquium, Case Western Reserve University, Department of Cognitive Science.

2006-2007

• Dr. Kamil Ud Deen won the Research Relations Fund Award for $4,750 for his proposal entitled, “The Acquisition of Principle C by Thai speaking children.”

Send corrections, additions, and news items for future issues to linguist at hawaii dot edu. We’d especially enjoy hearing news from alumni.