UConn Linguistics

UConn Linguistics page of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut

Congratulations Dr. Jenkins!On Apr 3rd, Robin Jenkins successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled “Comparativ...
05/19/2026

Congratulations Dr. Jenkins!

On Apr 3rd, Robin Jenkins successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled “Comparative explorations in the middle-field”.

Congrats again Robin!

This Friday at 4 PM (UTC-4), we invite you to join us for an online colloquium with Professor Luis Alonso-Ovalle from Mc...
04/23/2026

This Friday at 4 PM (UTC-4), we invite you to join us for an online colloquium with Professor Luis Alonso-Ovalle from McGill University. The talk is titled “Hidden Structure in the Composition of Degree DPs” Everyone is welcome to join the Webex Meeting (2633 452 4867). You can contact organizers Jiayi Zhou or Heesun Yang for more information. We hope to see you there!

This Friday at 4 PM, we invite you to join us for an in-person colloquium with Professor Athulya Aravind from Yale Unive...
04/16/2026

This Friday at 4 PM, we invite you to join us for an in-person colloquium with Professor Athulya Aravind from Yale University at SHH 117. The talk is titled “Undiscoverable Meanings”. We hope to see you there!

This Friday at 4 PM (UTC-4), we invite you to join us for an online colloquium with Professor Paolo Acquaviva from Unive...
04/09/2026

This Friday at 4 PM (UTC-4), we invite you to join us for an online colloquium with Professor Paolo Acquaviva from University College Dublin. The talk is titled “Why words?” Everyone is welcome to join the Webex Meeting (2870 512 7290). You can contact organizers Jiayi Zhou or Heesun Yang for more information. We hope to see you there!

This Friday at *3:35 PM*, we invite you to join us for an in-person colloquium with Professor Martina Martinović from Mc...
04/02/2026

This Friday at *3:35 PM*, we invite you to join us for an in-person colloquium with Professor Martina Martinović from McGill University at SHH 117. The talk is titled “Finiteness as Maximal Predication”. We hope to see you there!

Apr 3 update: Please note that due to unexpected evening closure of SHH, the talk is moved earlier to 3:35 PM.

Congratulations Dr. Lee!On Feb 6th, Chui Yi (Margaret) Lee successfully defended her doctoral dissertation titled “How D...
03/27/2026

Congratulations Dr. Lee!

On Feb 6th, Chui Yi (Margaret) Lee successfully defended her doctoral dissertation titled “How Do Children Acquire Definiteness? An Acquisitional Study of English- and Cantonese-acquiring Children”.

Congrats again Maggie!

UConn Linguistics was at BUCLD 50! The 50th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 50) took ...
12/03/2025

UConn Linguistics was at BUCLD 50!

The 50th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 50) took place on November 6-9th 2025. UConn Linguistics was 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

… 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
• Clariana Vieira and Elaine Grolla (PhD 2005, now at University of Sao Paolo). Wh-in-situ acquisition in French and in Brazilian Portuguese: Statistical and Prosodic cues
• 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 student 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
• Antonio Codina and Elaine Grolla. The Bare Truth: Bare Nominals Acquisition Challenges for Brazilian Learners of English, French, and Spanish
• 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! 🍾

Boston University is a leading private research institution with two primary campuses in the heart of Boston and programs around the world.

This Friday at 4 PM, we invite you to join us for an in-person colloquium with Professor Wataru Uegaki from the Universi...
11/11/2025

This Friday at 4 PM, we invite you to join us for an in-person colloquium with Professor Wataru Uegaki from the University of Edinburgh at SHH 117. The talk is titled “Lexicalization, compositionality, and communicative efficiency: The case of deontic priority”. We hope to see you there!

UConn Linguistics was at NELS!The 56th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society took place at New York Unive...
11/08/2025

UConn Linguistics was at NELS!

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”

Below is a photo of some of the UConn linguists, past and present, at the conference. ✨

This Friday at 4 PM (UTC-4), we invite you to join us for an online colloquium with Professor Maria Gouskova (NYU). The ...
10/29/2025

This Friday at 4 PM (UTC-4), we invite you to join us for an online colloquium with Professor Maria Gouskova (NYU). The talk is titled “Reduplication Without Syllable Copying”. You can contact organizers Jiayi Zhou or Heesun Yang for the link. We hope to see you there!

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