2008

December 2008

• William O'Grady gave an invited keynote talk at the 2008 Conference on Bilingual Acquisition in Early Childhood, held in Hong Kong on December 11 and 12. While in Hong Kong, he also gave two invited talks at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
• Language Legacies, the newsletter of the Endangered Language Fund, has announced that M.A. student Paulina Yourupi has received a grant to develop a writing system for Pollapese, her native language.  Pollapese is spoken on the atoll of Pollap in Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia. Paulina's work will also involve documenting the language in various settings and archiving her data so that they will be accessible to linguists around the world, to Pollapese speakers themselves, and to the general public.
• Ph.D student Nian Liu and undergraduate student Dan X. Hall presented their paper, 'Chinese-English bilingual children show an advantage over English monolingual children in the acquisition of temporal terms and concepts' at the Conference on Bilingual Acquisition in Early Childhood in Hong Kong. The conference, sponsored by the Child Bilingualism Research Center and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, brought together leading researchers from around the world to discuss early bilingualism. Also in attendance at the conference was M.A. student Mai Takemoto. Professor William O'Grady delivered one of the invited keynote talks.
• Dr. Cathy Sin-Ping Wong (Ph.D. 1998) has been appointed associate head of the Department of English at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong's largest institution of post-secondary education.
• Nick Thieberger gave an invited presentation at the Directions in Oceanic Research conference in Newcastle, Australia.

November 2008

• Graduate students Heeyeon Dennison and Diana Stojanovic, recent alum Hyekyung Hwang (Ph.D. 2007), and faculty Victoria Anderson and Amy Schafer presented their research at the 156th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, the leading national forum for research in phonetics.
• Ph.D. student Hunter Hatfield has presented a single authored paper, 'An acoustic functional grammar of English intonation,' at the annual meeting of the Acoustic Society of America, the world's largest and most important conference on phonetics.

October 2008

• Good news for Ph.D. student Jun Nomura, who has had three papers published in the last few months. Ishikawa, K. & Nomura, J. (2008). 'Word stress placement by native speakers and Japanese learners of English.' Proceedings of Interspeech 2008 (Brisbane, Australia), pp. 1955-1958.Nomura, J. (2008). 'Japanese non-verb-final constituent order as a way to ensure referent activation.' Kotoba no Kagaku Kenkyu (Journal of the Japan Society for Speech Sciences), 9, pp. 49-63.
  Nomura, J. (2008). 'Early sensitivity to information structure in Japanese.' In Chan, H., Jacob, H., and Kapia, E. (Eds.). Proceedings of the 32nd Boston University Conference on Language Development (Vol. 2), pp. 323-334, Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
• The Japanese translation of William O’Grady’s book, How Children Learn Language, has just been published by Kenkyusha Press (with Professor Seiji Uchida as the translator). This is the second translation of William’s book (first published by Cambridge University Press in 2005); it was translated into Korean in 2006.
• Sam Leung (Ph.D. 1995) has just been appointed head of the Department of Early Childhood Education at the Hong Kong Institute ofEducation. Sam wrote his Ph.D. dissertation here on UH on language acquisition under the supervision of professor emerita Ann Peters.
• Fabiana Picolo (Ph.D. 2008) has just been hired as speech scientist by Nuance Communications in Montreal, Canada. Nuance Communications develops speech recognition, voice authentication, text-to-speech and VoiceXML-based voice-browsing products and development tools for telephone access.
• Ben Bergen's paper 'A whole-systems approach to language: An interview with Luc Steels' has appeared in the Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 6, 329-344.
• Nick Thieberger gave a talk on 'The importance of technological standards and training in language documentation' at the Swedish Linguistic Society workshop on Language Documentation.
• Nick Thieberger has received an Australian Research Council QEII Fellowship award (in the amount of Aus. $770,000) with Dr Rachel Nordlinger at the University of Melbourne) to further develop research methodologies for field linguistics and linguistic archiving. This research will also result in grammars and reusable corpora of four previously undescribed languages.

 September 2008

August 2008

• William O’Grady gave an invited plenary talk at the 13th meeting of the Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics, which was held on our campus this month. William’s talk was entitled ‘What the study of scope can tell us about second language learning.’
• Ben Bergen's co-authored paper (with Jerome Feldman) 'Concept learning according to cognitive science' has just been published in the Elsevier Handbook of Cognitive Science.
• Ben Bergen presented an invited talk at the American Psychological Association 116th Annual Convention ('The crosstalk hypothesis: Why can you walk and chew gum but not talk and drive?').
• Nick Thieberger presented a talk on using XML for interlinear glossed text at the 4th International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (ICHORA4) in Perth, Western Australia. He also gave a talk entitled 'A practice-based archive: Reflections on the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)' to Society for the History of Linguistics in the Pacific conference.
• The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), of which Nick Thieberger is the Project Manager, received the award for research in the Humanities and Social Sciences from the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative. The prize is a DELL server worth $26,000.
• Robert Blust has just completed his term as department chair--the position now passes to William O'Grady. During the past three years, as he served as department chair, Bob published five single-authored papers in 2007, four in 2006, and five in 2005. In addition he published two reviews in 2005 (one a review article), and completed an 850 page book which is scheduled to be published by Pacific Linguistics at the Australian National University in Canberra. These are distributed over the following journals or other volumes (length in pages is given in parentheses):

July 2008

• Professor Emeritus Ann Peters was honored at a symposium on July 30, 2008, at the Eleventh Congress of the International Association for the Study of Child Language held at the University of Edinburgh,Scotland. Eleven speakers (from France, Germany, Israel, Poland, Spain and the US) reviewed her lifetime achievements in the study of children’s acquisition of language and her contributions and influence over her 40-year career in research and teaching.  Ann’s perspectives on the complexity of language acquisition were discussed and her pioneering efforts in the field were recognized. Rather than accept the standard view that child language is guided by an innate grammar and is thus relatively uniform, Ann challenged this view with empirical data from a variety of sources. Her research is held up today as a model for those interested in individual variation between children, and the role of social cognition in the acquisition oflanguage. Her vision has contributed to moving the field away from the assumption that all children learn language the same way. Her detailed, child-centered studies have provided evidence that children go through a long and individuated process of perception and construction of their language system. She has observed that, at a particular age, a given child may have only partially acquired certain wordsor grammatical notions, representing them ‘fuzzily’ rather than clearly, as adults do. Looking across the sub-fields of linguistics, she believes that each aspect of the language acquisition process impinges onevery other: sounds on vocabulary, vocabulary on grammar.  By imposing only strictly necessary linguistic assumptions about children's productions, Ann has made researchers aware of the difficulties children encounter in identifying their first useful linguistic units, an issue that still faces researchers today.
• Ben Bergen was an invited faculty instructor for a week-long course on 'Gesture and mental simulation' at the workshop on Empirical Methods in Cognitive Linguistics in Odense, Denmark.
• Nick Thieberger presented a paper titled 'Where's the data' at the Australian Linguistic Society Conference, as well as an XML workshop at the eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne.

June 2008

• William O’Grady gave two invited plenaries this month. The first, at Harvard University’s Heritage Language Institute, was entitled ‘Practical and theoretical issues in the study of partial language acquisition.’ It was co-authored by On-Soon Lee, a graduate student in our department, and by Professor Jinhwa Lee from East Asian Languages and Literatures.  William’s second presentation, ‘Some issues in Korean syntax and processing: Rethinking scope’ (co-authored with Sunyoung Lee, one of our graduate students), was made at the 16th biennial meeting of the International Circle of Korean Linguistics, held at Cornell University.

May 2008

• Ph.D. student Valerie Guerin has published a paper, 'Writing an endangered language,' in Language Documentation and Conservation 2(1):47-67.
• The sixth edition of ContemporaryLinguistic Analysis: An Introduction, co-authored and co-edited by WilliamO’Grady and John Archibald (University of Calgary) has just been published in Canada by Pearson. The sixth American edition of this much acclaimed and widely used textbook is currently in preparation and will be published in 2009 by St.Martin’s Press.
• At the Spring Symposium for Undergraduate Research and Creative Work held at the East-West Center’s Imin Center, linguistics undergraduate student James Crippen won first place in his division, in BOTH the oral presentation and poster categories, for his research project entitled 'Tlingit Language Documentation.' 
• Under the auspices of a fellowship with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Ben Bergen presented invited lectures on 'Mental simulation in language understanding' at Kyoto University, Kobe University, Osaka City University, Tokyo University, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

April 2008

• Ben Bergen received a Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, designating him as a "Long-Term Fellow".

March 2008

• Ph.D. student Manami Sato made a presentation, 'Verb types influence mental imagery in Japanese sentence comprehension,' at The 21st annual CUNY conference on human sentence processing, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the world's leading psycholinguistics conference. The paper was co-authored by Amy Schafer. This is Manami's third presentation at the CUNY conference.
• Cambridge University Press has just published an importantnew book on Korean jointly authored by Miho Choo (Ph.D., 2006) and Hye-Young Kwak, a current graduate student in our department. Using Korean, part of a major Cambridge series, is a guide to Korean language usage for intermediate and advanced students of the language.

January 2008

• Ph.D. student Manami Sato presented a paper, 'Temporal dynamics of mental image construction in Japanese language comprehension,' at The 82nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, in Chicago, Illinois. This is the premier linguistics conference in the world.
• The journal Lingua has just published a special issue devoted to the comparison of emergentist and UG-based approaches to second language acquisition. The issue includes a lead article on emergentism by William O’Grady, as well as a second article (co-authored with two former graduate students) on the intricacies of want to contraction in second language acquisition.
• Ben Bergen's co-authored paper (with Frederic Kaplan and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer), entitled 'Computational models in the debate over language learnability' has appeared in Infant and Child Development.

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