There is so much to celebrate as we (SCling) Wrap up the academic year — see below for news and pictures from graduations / hoodings / defenses, and more!

Congratulations to all the graduating seniors!

• Edwin Delgado, Linguistics
• Benny Escobar-Vidal, Linguistics
• Tabitha Johnson, Linguistics/Cognitive Science
• Carter Kawaguchi, Computational Linguistics
• Hyun Ji Kang, Linguistics minor
• Camryn Lee, Linguistics and East Asian Languages and Cultures
• Maria Leyva- Hernandez, Linguistics (Fall 2025 graduate)
• Ayoub Mahamoud, Computational Linguistics
• Phia McCarthy, Linguistics (Fall 2025 graduate)
• Hannah Nelson, Linguistics and East Asian Languages and Cultures
• Kyle Ng, Computational Linguistics
• Susan Nyirenda, Computational Linguistics (Fall 2025 graduate)
• Billie Oleyar, Linguistics minor
• Luis Rodriguez, Jr., Linguistics
• Jack Schilson, Computational Linguistics
• Sabrina Soto, Linguistics
• Lucas Sumartha, Computational Linguistics
• Ziqing Tang, Computational Linguistics
• Brian Winn, Linguistics
• Eileen Yang, Linguistics
• Gary Yu, Computational Linguistics
• Andy Zhang, Linguistics

A wonderful graduation celebration

Campus was in full celebration mode May 13 – 15. Graduating students and their families attended Commencement on Thursday, May 14. Then on Friday, May 15, the Linguistics Department hosted a celebratory lunch, and students and their families attended a special graduation ceremony for the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Check out photographic evidence below!

PhD Hooding Ceremony

Graduate students Muxuan He and Katie Kennedy attended the PhD hooding ceremony with their advisors Elsi Kaiser and Khalil Iskarous. Muxuan and Katie will be defending their dissertations later this summer, please join us in congratulating them on their upcoming graduation!

Dissertation defended!

Kyle Ng profiled by USC Dornsife News

Check out this lovely profile of Comp Ling major Kyle Ng, featured in USC Dornsife News and titled “Love of language and community — and AI safety — fuel graduating senior’s USC Dornsife experience.” Full link here: https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/computational-linguistics-student-finds-love-of-language-and-ai-safety-at-usc-dornsife/

GE Teaching award ceremony

Inked ✍️

• Muxuan He & Elsi Kaiser. 2026. ” ‘Just-Right’ Is (Not) Always Right: Joint Effects of Typicality and Informativity During Real-Time Sentence Processing.” Cognitive Science. Link to paper.
• Zuzanna Fuchs, John Muegge & Christine Shea. 2026. “Do heritage speakers work harder in their heritage language? A dual task study of cognitive effort in bilingual language processing.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. Link to paper.

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

• Yingyu Su gave a talk titled ” ‘Denominal’ Verbs without n: Evidence from Tonal Verbalizer in Nantou Hua” at the 44th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL), held on May 6-8, 2026, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City, Mexico.
  
  Fun fact from Su: “The day of my presentation was also the day of the national earthquake drill. And coincidentally, the drill is set to right after my talk! So I literally had to run out with the audience the very second that I finished my Q&A.”

And if you’ve made it this far — this is my official sign-off as co-editor of SCling Wrap for this year. I’m passing the baton back to Deniz Rudin for the fall, but I’ll be (SCling) Wrapping again in Spring 2027.

Classes are done, the end of AY 2025-2026 is just around the corner! This will be the last regular issue of SCling Wrap. We will post a special graduation edition in mid-May.

If you have news to share, please submit your news for future issues of SCling Wrap, cause we need your help keeping up with what’s ✨fresh✨ at USC Linguistics.

Fuchs receives tenure

Zuzanna Fuchs received tenure at approximately 11:55am on April 24, 2026. It was a process remarkably free of suspense, due to Zuzanna’s evidently outstanding record of research, teaching, and service. We were all happy to hear it nonetheless. To Associate Professor Fuchs, the USC Linguistics department has this to say: ‘til death do us part.
[Written by guest editor Deniz Rudin.]

More (!) undergraduates admitted to graduate programs

We are happy to share that, in addition to what was shared in our post from April 17 regarding Ling undergraduate students pursuing graduate school, two more undergraduate have good news regarding their future plans:

• Benito Escobar-Vidal (Linguistics, Spanish ’26) will pursue a PhD in Romance Languages & Linguistics at UC Berkeley. He was awarded the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship to fund a full five years in the PhD program.
• Lucas Sumartha (Computational Linguistics, ’26) will pursue a MS in Connective Media M.S. at Cornell Tech to study low resource language documentation and revitalization.

Inked ✍️

• Aditya Kommineni, Woojae Jeong, Kleanthis Avramidis, Colin McDaniel, Myzelle Hughes, Thomas McGee, Elsi Kaiser, Kristina Lerman, Idan Blank, Dani Byrd, Assal Habibi, Rael Cahn, Sudarsana Kadiri, Takfarinas Medani, Richard Leahy & Shrikanth Narayanan. (To appear). “Neural Responses to Affective Sentences Reveal Signatures of Depression”. Translational Psychiatry. 

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

• Canaan Breiss gave an invited colloquium talk at UC Davis on April 27, 2026. The title of his talk was “Lexical idiosyncrasy and abstraction in the English comparative/superlative alternation”.
• Upcoming: On May 5, 2026, Stephanie Shih will give an invited colloquium talk at the UCLA Department of Anthropology, in the Discourse Lab. The title of her talk will be “Constructing identities and the use of semiotic context in language and art”.

USiL spotted ConLanging in GFS

This week USiL made a conlang with Andrew Murphy!

Thank you & good luck Canaan!

The graduate students threw a surprise party for Canaan Breiss in the conference room to say goodbye and good luck in Chicago!

Upcoming Events: Join us for a graduation celebration on May 15!

There will be a Linguistics Department graduation celebration on Friday, May 15! The event will be held on the ground floor of GFS, 2-3.30pm. Come celebrate the graduating class of 2026 and the end of the semester! This event is for both undergraduate and graduate Linguistics students and their families — everyone is welcome. Stay tuned for details. We look forward to seeing you on the 15th!

If you have news to share, please submit your news for future issues of SCling Wrap, cause we need your help keeping up with what’s ✨fresh✨ at USC Linguistics.

Faculty get teaching shoutouts

Students featured on the USC Thematic Option social media account this week gave a shoutout to Dani Byrd‘s CORE 103: Human Speech course. You can check it out here.

Additionally, the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching (CET) featured Zuzanna Fuchs in their “What a Great Teaching Idea” series, highlighting a consultant-model assignment Zuzanna developed for her course GESM 130: Language Contact & Language Acquisition. You can read and/or watch a video about it here. This isn’t the first time the CET has featured a Linguistics faculty member in this series! Check out this article from last year highlighting Mary Byram Washburn‘s in-class group activity on 5-minute pidgins.

Inked ✍️

• Colin McDaniel, Myzelle L. Hughes, Takfarinas Medani, Woojae Jeong, Thomas A. McGee, Aditya Kommineni, Kleanthis Avramidis, Hamzeh Alturk, Dani Byrd, Kristina Lerman, Sudarsana R. Kadiri, Idan A. Blank, Richard M. Leahy, Shrikanth Narayanan, B. Rael Cahn, Assal Habibi. 2026. “Neural evidence of disrupted self-referential processing in suicidal depression.” Journal of Affective Disorders. Link to paper.

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

• Three of the graduate students traveled all the way to Siena, Italy, to present their work at the 48th Generative Linguistics in the Old World conference (GLOW 48), held at the University of Siena on April 21-23, 2026.
  • Zhixian Huang gave an oral presentation titled “Saturating theta roles via implicit arguments”.
  • Nelli Marutyan presented a poster on “The syntax of nuclear stress in Eastern Armenian”.
  • Yaqing Hu presented a poster on “Number-driven definiteness in a classifier language”.

USiL around town

This week, USiL students, along with graduate students JK Subramony & Zhi Zhang, went on an 8-mile hike led by Andrew Simpson to Millard Canyon waterfall in the San Gabriel Mountains! After a seeing a beautiful waterfall, the hikers trekked to lovely lunch at Noodle World. Additionally, the Recursion Reading Group continued reading AI 2027, looking at one potential outcome of the predicted AI Race: “Race Ending”. Next week, we will look at the other potential outcome.

Thanks for the colloq!

Prof. Christopher Hammerly (Univ. of British Columbia) gave an excellent colloquium on Monday, April 20. Thanks to Prof. Hammerly for a great talk, super helpful 1-on-1 student meetings, and lively discussions over lunch and dinner!

Upcoming Events

Department Events

• Monday, April 27 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: Yubin Zhang
• Tuesday, April 28 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab:
  • Muxuan He, “What’s described vs. what’s uttered: The effect of communicative form and how sentence polarity modulates it”
  • Linh Pham, “Predictability and cue-based retrieval in optional dependencies”
• Wednesday, April 29 at 2pm @ S-Side Story:
  • Yingyu Su, “Instrumental denominals without n: Tonal Evidence from Nantou Hua” (WCCFL practice talk)
  • Daniel Shevchenko, “One order, different objects: on the derivations and interpretations of SOV in East Slavic” (FASL practice talk)
• Friday, May 1 at 1pm @ MeaningLab: Peter O’Neill, “A different path to result modification: result-oriented adverbs in Korean”

USiL Events

Undergraduate Students in Linguistics is holding Weekly General Meetings on Wednesdays from 6-8pm in GFS 330. All interested undergraduates are encouraged to attend—no prerequisites necessary. If one evening meeting a week leaves you craving more, never fear: the Recursion Reading Group meets on Tuesdays from 8:00-9:00pm to discuss the intersection of language, AI, and more!

If you have news to share, please submit your news for future issues of SCling Wrap, cause we need your help keeping up with what’s ✨fresh✨ at USC Linguistics.

Undergraduates admitted to PhD programs

Congratulations to some of our star undergraduates on their admission to top-tier PhD programs! We can’t wait to see all the fantastic work you will be doing in this next step of your academic careers.

• Haoxi Yu (Computational Linguistics ’26) will pursue a PhD in Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) .
• Ameen Qureshi (Computational Linguistics ’26) will pursure a PhD in the Cognitive Science of Language at McMaster University.

More (!) graduate student research and teaching awards

Congratulations are also in order for Yingyu Su, who was awarded the General Education Graduate Assistant Award for her contributions to the GE program during the Fall 2024 through Spring 2025 academic year. And the awards for our grad students don’t stop there: Jessica Campbell received a Graduate School Dean’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Congrats Su & Jessica!

Industry career panel

The department hosted an Industry Jobs Panel on Tuesday, April 14. Many thanks to the panelists for their time and their insights (listed below) and to Mary Byram Washburn for organizing!

• Samantha Gordon Danner (USC PhD 2018): Project Manager, Viterbi Office of Research
• David Li (USC PhD 2014): Analytics and Data Science, ProSearch
• Lauren Northrup (UCLA PhD 2016): Market and UX research,  Instagram

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

• Jyothiraditya Nellakra & JK Subramony gave a talk on “The Verbal Spine in Malayalam: The Causative and the Verbalizer are Picky” at (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages 16 hosted at the other USC (University of South Carolina) April 10-11.
• Metehan Oğuz & Elsi Kaiser gave a talk titled “Clause type boosts the effects of syntax: Non-local binding inside Turkish ki-clauses” at the 11th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic held at MIT April 11-12.
• Victoria Chang & Toby Mintz gave a talk on “Bootstrapping the mind: Syntax guides children’s learning of mental state verbs” at the Biennial Meeting of the Cognitive Development Society 2026, which took place in Montréal, Canada April 9-11.
• USC hosted the Southern California April Meeting on Phonology (SCAMP) on April 11th. The event was a huge success, with approx. 45 attendees from our neighboring SoCal institutions, including CSULB, UCLA, USC, UCSB, UCSD, UCI, and UCSF. The event included several talks by USC faculty and students:
  • Dhanya Charan (CMU) & Canaan Breiss: “Stress Clash on the Production of Sesquisyllabic Words”
  • Po-Hsuan Huang: “Competition between phonological well-formedness and semantic constraints in marked compounds”
  • Dhanya Charan (CMU), Yue Chen, Darby Grachek, Po-Hsuan Huang, Muxuan He, Haley Hsu, Jane Li (Johns Hopkins), Yang Wang (Univ. of Utah), Canaan Breiss: “A large-scale corpus investigation of Italian Troncamento“
  • Muxuan He: “Tone-to-Vowel Alignment and Tonal Coarticulation in Wuxue Mandarin”
  • Natsumi Taniguchi: “The Role of Word Frequency and Stress-Prominence Matching in Sung Word Recognition”
  • Darby Grachek: “Investigating the Role of Lexical Decomposition in Learning Phonological Alternations”

• Additionally, Colloquium speaker Sharon Rose (UCSD) gave a wonderful talk on Monday, April 13. However, she got some ruff questions from audience member Charlie Shih-Rudin.

Upcoming Events

Colloquium Monday, April 20: Christopher Hammerly (UBC)

Please join us for the last colloquium this Spring with speaker Christopher Hammerly (Univ. of British Columbia).

When: Monday, April 20th @ 3:30 PM
Where: GFS 330 (and via Zoom, see email for link + passcode)

Title: The [Addressee] asymmetry
Abstract: The goal of this talk is to frame, and propose a solution for, an issue that I call the [Addressee] asymmetry. On one hand, there are strong arguments (e.g. Harbour 2016; Cowper & Hall 2019) that there must NOT be an (independent) [Addressee] feature available for the derivation of person categories. A system with only [Participant] and [Author] can do the job, and adding in [Addressee] as a third feature overpredicts the typological possibilities. On the other hand, there are strong arguments that there MUST be an independent [Addressee] feature in the domain of person agreement, in order to capture the behavior of probes that, for example, show 2 > 1 > 3 hierarchy effects (e.g. Nez Perce C agreement, as described in Deal 2015). This conundrum—that [Addressee] must NOT exist in the domain of deriving person categories, but MUST exist in the domain of person agreement—is the core of the [Addressee] asymmetry. The proposed solution to this, and a number of subsidiary problems, has two key ingredients. First, a theory of person features based in contrastive interpretations (Cowper & Hall 2019; Hammerly 2023), where [Addressee] is derived from [Participant] rather than being independently present as a third feature. Second, a theory where the matching conditions of a probe with a goal are defined using logical conjunction and disjunction (e.g. Hammerly 2024). This allows for a set of possible probes that can correctly predict the typology of possible person hierarchy effects.

Shih features at Roski Talks

Stephanie Shih will give a joint talk with Susie Ferrell as part of the Roski Talks lecture series hosted by the USC Roski School of Art & Design. The event takes place Tuesday, April 21, 7-8:30pm at the Roski Graduate Building. More details regarding the event are available here. All are welcome!

Department Events

• Monday, April 20 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: Jessica Campbell (Zoom meeting)
• Tuesday, April 21 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab:
  • Esra Eldem-Tunç, “The Interpretation of Null and Overt Pronominal Elements in Heritage Turkish: The Role of Coherence Relations”
  • Mete Oğuz, “Experimental investigations of indexical shift in Turkish”
• Wednesday, April 22 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: no meeting

USiL Events

Undergraduate Students in Linguistics is holding Weekly General Meetings on Wednesdays from 6-8pm in GFS 330. All interested undergraduates are encouraged to attend—no prerequisites necessary. If one evening meeting a week leaves you craving more, never fear: the Recursion Reading Group meets on Tuesdays from 8:00-9:00pm to discuss the intersection of language, AI, and more!

Lots of news this week! Be sure to scroll all the way down for several upcoming academic and professional events.

If you have news to share, please submit your news for future issues of SCling Wrap, cause we need your help keeping up with what’s ✨fresh✨ at USC Linguistics.

Research awards (plural!) for Ling grad students

Congratulations to Mete Oğuz and Darby Grachek, who both received the USC Graduate School Summer Research and Writing Grants. An extra congrats to Mete, who was awarded the Graduate School Second Century Fellowship to cover research to be conducted in the 2026-2027 academic year.

Linguistics students at USC Annual Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Work

Ashley Adji, Jacob Denina, and Andy Zhang, three undergraduates working with Elsi Kaiser, presented a poster entitled “Worth a Thousand Words:  Linguistic Meaning and Spatial Location” at USC’s 27th Annual Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Work on Wednesday, April 8. Many thanks to the grad students who came by to see the poster (as well as another language-related poster right next to it)!

Jennifer Arnold gives talk

On Thursday, April 9, USC hosted Jennifer Arnold (Univ. of North Carolina). Jennifer gave a talk titled “Learning discourse biases for pronoun comprehension from exposure” and met with students throughout the day.

USiL Redecorate-Ling

April showers bring wug flowers! The Undergraduate Students in Linguistics welcomed in the start of spring with some fresh departmental decor.

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

• Canaan Breiss gave a talk on “Emergent morpho-phonological representations in models of spoken word recognition” at the Artificial Intelligence Seminar hosted by the USC Information Science Institute. This is joint work with Jon Gauthier (UCSF), Matthew Leonard (UCSF), and Eddie Chang (UCSF).

Upcoming Events

Colloquium Monday, April 13: Sharon Rose (UCSD)

Please join us for the second colloquium this Spring with speaker Sharon Rose (UCSD).

When: Monday, April 13th @ 3:30 PM
Where: GFS 330 (and via Zoom, email for link + passcode)

Title: Grammatical tone and syntactic tone in Rere: differential behavior
Abstract: Tonal correlates of topic and focus constructions in African tone languages are often indirect, manifested as restrictions on tone spreading or tone marking on elements that are not topics or focus. In this talk, I will present data from Rere (Koalib), a Kordofanian language of Sudan that exhibits grammatical tone to mark aspect, mood and deixis, as well as ‘syntactic’ high tones that mark topic and focus constructions at the edges of the verb stem or auxiliary. In addition, topic configurations determine the grammatical role of pronominal enclitics attached to the verb, indicated by tonal case marking. Two patterns of progressive high tone spreading occur within the verbal complex, serving as prosodic connection between morphological units. Bounded spreading connects auxiliaries to the verb stem, and unbounded spreading connects subject clitics and negation to the rest of the verb complex. These two spreading patterns interact with high tones on the final vowel of the verb stem in different ways. High tone that marks case and topic on the final vowel blocks unbounded spreading and induces bounded spreading, a type of ‘sour grapes’ pattern. Conversely, high tone that marks aspect-mood-deixis on the same final vowel favors unbounded spreading and prevents bounded spreading. These patterns are connected to the function and domain of the attachment of the H tones.

Learn about industry jobs and see what our alumni are up to!

There will be a career panel hosted by the USC Career Center featuring six (!!) USC Linguistics PhD alumni on Thursday, April 23, at 6pm. This is a great chance to network with experienced alumni, both recent graduates and people with 10+ years’ worth of experience. During their time at USC, these panelists specialized in a variety of linguistic subfields, including syntax, semantics, phonology, phonetics and psycholinguistics.

IMPORTANT: The USC Career Center event takes place via Zoom, and prior registration is required via Handshake; more information here: https://careers.usc.edu/events/2026/04/23/inside-tech-industry-perspectives-and-networking-for-graduate-doctoral-students/.

SCAMP @ USC

USC will host the 2026 Southern California Meeting on Phonology this Saturday, April 11. It will take place in Leavey Library, room LVL 16, from 9am to 6pm. All are welcome!

Department Events

• Monday, April 13 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: specialist talk by Sharon Rose (UCSD)
• Tuesday, April 14 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: No meeting
• Wednesday, April 15 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: Zhi Zheng
• Friday, April 17 at 1pm @ MeaningLab: Iris Wang (USC Philosophy)
• Friday, April 17 at 4pm @ MLLA: Eric Margolis (University of British Columbia), “The Rationalism-Empiricism Debate in the Twenty-First Century”

USiL Events

Undergraduate Students in Linguistics is holding Weekly General Meetings on Wednesdays from 6-8pm in GFS 330. All interested undergraduates are encouraged to attend—no prerequisites necessary. If one evening meeting a week leaves you craving more, never fear: the Recursion Reading Group meets on Tuesdays from 8:00-9:00pm to discuss the intersection of language, AI, and more!

If you have news to share, please submit your news for future issues of SCling Wrap, cause we need your help keeping up with what’s ✨fresh✨ at USC Linguistics.

Inked ✍️

• Zuzanna Fuchs, Esra Eldem-Tunç, Linh Pham, Leo Mermelstein & Anna Runova. (2026). When gender meets number: facilitative processing of one vs. two features on Spanish definite articles. Frontiers in Language Sciences 5:1760372. Link to paper.
• Kleanthis Avramidis, Woojae Jeong, Aditya Kommineni, Sudarsana R. Kadiri, Marcus Ma, Colin McDaniel, Myzelle Hughes, Thomas McGee, Elsi Kaiser, Dani Byrd, Assal Habibi, B. Rael Cahn, Idan A. Blank, Kristina Lerman, Takfarinas Medani, Richard M. Leahy & Shrikanth Narayanan. (2026). Deep learning characterizes depression and suicidal ideation from eye movements. npj Digital Medicine. Link to paper.

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

• USC was very well represented at the 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP), which took place at MIT on March 26-28, 2026:
  • Jun Lyu (PhD alum), Yuhan Liu, Elsi Kaiser: “Perspective and the processing of Chinese reflexives: a visual-world eye-tracking study”
  • Elsi Kaiser: “Talking to myself (or yourself)? Production of first- and second-person pronouns in self-talk.”
  • Elsi Kaiser: “Visuospatial representations and looking beyond grammar”
  • Yuting Gu, Haley Hsu, Elsi Kaiser, Xin Xie: “Processing constraints and resource competition in non-native speech error detection”
  • Jun Lyu (PhD alum), Sarah Yunita, Elsi Kaiser: “Transfer of anti-logophoricity effects in L2 Chinese reflexive resolution”
  • Bram Goh, Elsi Kaiser: “Syntactic flexibility in the maze: Exploring verb type and definiteness”
  • Metehan Oğuz, Elsi Kaiser: “Non-local binding and person-blocking effects in Turkish”
  • Linh Pham, Zuzanna Fuchs, Elsi Kaiser: “Lack of Island Sensitivity Transfers: Vietnamese L1 Effects on L2 English Sentence Processing” [oral presentation]
  • Esra Eldem-Tunç, Leo Mermelstein, Metehan Oğuz, Julian Patino, JK Subramony, Seoyoon Hong, Zuzanna Fuchs: “Facilitative Processing of Gender in the Absence of Overt Agreement Morphology in Heritage Spanish Speakers”
  • Aneta Miękisz, Zuzanna Fuchs, Grzegorz Krajewski: “Polish-speaking children show facilitative use of gender marking for both high-frequency and low-frequency adjectives.”
  • Haley Hsu, Brandon Papineau: “Say my [insert name]: Participant lexical selection increases participant engagement”
  • JK Subramony: “Turning the tables: Exploring implicit causality effects on cataphoric pronouns”
  • Sarah Yunita, Jun Lyu (PhD alum): “Acquisition of the blocking effect in L2 Chinese by L1 Indonesian speakers”
  • Jun Lyu (PhD alum), Zhenwei Xing, Jiwon Yun: “Reduced efficiency in applying Binding Principle B during L2 English pronoun resolution”
  • Yuhan Liu, Jun Lyu (PhD alum): “Discourse topicality and the processing of implicit causality in Chinese”
  • Yue Chen: “Too Much Information? Mandarin Classifiers from Humans to LLMs”
  • Heeju Hwang (PhD alum), Qiao Gan: “The Mechanisms of Pronoun Priming”

USiL trivia, reading group, and Schedule-Ling

This week, USiL was busy! The group played a trivia game made by JK Subramony and met with Elsi Kaiser to discuss students’ questions about scheduling linguistics classes for the upcoming academic year. The Recursion Reading Group continued to read AI 2027 and discuss Judge Rita Lin’s ruling on Anthropic v. Pentagon. Next week, the group will discuss the source code leakage of Claude Code and AI models deceiving humans to protect others LLMs.

Upcoming Events

Department Events

• Monday, April 6 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: Khalil Iskarous
• Tuesday, April 7 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab:
  • Zhixian Huang, discussion of Socolof et al., (2025) “The idiom processing advantage is explained by surprisal.”
  • Mandy Cartner, “Grammatical resumptive pronouns facilitate processing before they are perceived”
• Wednesday, April 8 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: Hunter Johnson (UCLA), “Flexible Search Conditions on Movement Probes”
• Friday, April 24 at 1pm @ MeaningLab: Rodrigo Garro Rivera (USC Philosophy)

USiL Events

Undergraduate Students in Linguistics is holding Weekly General Meetings on Wednesdays from 6-8pm in GFS 330. All interested undergraduates are encouraged to attend—no prerequisites necessary. If one evening meeting a week leaves you craving more, never fear: the Recursion Reading Group meets on Tuesdays from 8:00-9:00pm to discuss the intersection of language, AI, and more!

If you have news to share, please submit your news for future issues of SCling Wrap, cause we need your help keeping up with what’s ✨fresh✨ at USC Linguistics.

Ling faculty & graduate student recognized for excellence in teaching

Congratulations to Zuzanna Fuchs, who has received the inaugural Dana and David Dornsife College Early-Career Award for Teaching Excellence. This is “among USC Dornsife’s highest faculty honors – recognizing and celebrating colleagues who have made a tremendous impact on the life of our academic community”, through a “strong commitment to teaching excellence, pedagogical growth, and departmental curricular goals.”

Congratulations are also in order for Haley Hsu, who is one of three recipients of the 2025-2026 University Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award. Awarded by the Provost’s Office and USC’s Center for Excellence in Teaching, this is “USC’s highest honor for graduate student teaching. The award celebrates teaching that enriches student learning beyond the classroom.”

Inked ✍️

• Megha Sundara & Canaan Breiss. 2026. “The acquisition of native language phonotactics: Integrating insights from machine learning, and adult and infant experiments.” Cognition. Link to paper.
• Natsumi Taniguchi. 2026. “A Cross-linguistic Investigation on the Correlation between Functional Load of Tone and Tone-Melody Correspondence.” Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology. Link to paper.

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

• USC affiliates past and present gave talks at GLOW in Asia: The Second Workshop for Young Scholars, held at the Center for Linguistics at Nanzan University, Japan, on March 13-15, 2026:
  • Zhendong Liu & Lang Gaji, “A temporal analysis of two evidentials in Rngaba Amdo Tibetan”
  • Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee (alumnus) & Ka-Fai Yip, “Revisiting Parallel Chains: a long road to repetition”
  • Ian Roberts (alumnus) & Dalina Kallulli, “Discovering Parameters” (keynote talk)
• Canaan Breiss gave two talks at the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey, UK, over spring break. One was a research talk called “Token frequency and paradigm uniformity in two Japanese dialects”, and the other was a requested “nerd session” on MaxEnt, phonological theory, and statistics.

Upcoming Events

Department Events

• Monday, March 30 at 1pm @ PhonLunch:
  • Darby Grachek
  • Po-Hsuan Huang
• Tuesday, March 31 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: Greg Keating (SDSU) stats workshop on “Using the Box-Cox procedure in R to transform reading and response time data”
• Wednesday, April 1 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: Daniel Shevchenko
• Friday, April 3 at 1pm @ MeaningLab: Peter O’Neill

USiL Events

Undergraduate Students in Linguistics is holding Weekly General Meetings on Wednesdays from 6-8pm in GFS 330. All interested undergraduates are encouraged to attend—no prerequisites necessary. If one evening meeting a week leaves you craving more, never fear: the Recursion Reading Group meets on Tuesdays from 8:00-9:00pm to discuss the intersection of language, AI, and more!

Have a wonderful spring break, everyone!

If you have news to share, please submit your news for future issues of SCling Wrap, cause we need your help keeping up with what’s ✨fresh✨ at USC Linguistics.

Annual Open House went swimmingly

The Linguistics Department held its annual Open House on March 10-11, 2026, to introduce admitted PhD students to life in the department. Over two days, the admitted students had opportunities to attend classes and reading groups, meet with faculty, get to know ongoing research in the Psycholing poster session, and socialize with current graduate students over a pizza dinner. Looking forward to having you all join us next year!

USiL news

Wug stickers have appeared in the department, courtesy of USiL! Be sure to stop by your mailbox to collect yours. Also, the Recursion Reading Group met this past Tuesday to discuss current events in the field of AI and its influence on US politics.

Prof. Canaan Breiss is a marathoner

Congratulations to Canaan Breiss, who completed the LA Marathon on Sunday, March 8. This is Prof. Breiss’s first marathon, see below for the before and after shots:

Upcoming Events

Department Events

These are meetings that will take place after the break:

• Monday, March 23 at 1pm @ PhonLunch:
  • Haley Hsu, TBD
  • Natsumi Taniguchi, TBD
• Tuesday, March 24 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab:
  • Emma Kealey, “Activation of Grammatical Gender in The Mental Lexicon”
  • Katie Kennedy, TBD
• Wednesday, March 25 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: Zhixian Huang, practice talk for GLOW48

USiL Events

Undergraduate Students in Linguistics is holding Weekly General Meetings on Wednesdays from 6-8pm in GFS 330. All interested undergraduates are encouraged to attend—no prerequisites necessary. If one evening meeting a week leaves you craving more, never fear: the Recursion Reading Group meets on Tuesdays from 8:00-9:00pm to discuss the intersection of language, AI, and more!

If you have news to share, please submit your news for future issues of SCling Wrap, cause we need your help keeping up with what’s ✨fresh✨ at USC Linguistics.

Graduate students receive EASC Fellowships

Three graduate students received Summer 2026 Graduate Fellowship awards from the USC East Asian Studies Center. Congratulations to Po-Hsuan Huang, Zhixian Huang, and Natsumi Taniguchi! You can read more about the award here.

Inked ✍️

• Haley Hsu, Kyle Ng, Ameen Qureshi, Dani Byrd & Khalil Iskarous. (2026). Automation of real-time vocal tract image segmentation with SAM 2.0 and morphological operation implementation. JASA Express Lett. 6(3), 035202. Link to paper.

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

• USC was well represented at the 2026 Madonna Conference on Motor Speech held in Tempe, AZ on Feb. 25-28:
  • Jessica Campbell, Dani Byrd & Louis Goldstein. Spectral (and articulatory) temporal properties of dysarthric speech.
  • Christopher Geissler & Jyothi Nellakra. Critically-damped oscillators and General Tau Theory exhibit similar error across speakers with different vocal tract dimensions.
• …as well as at the 5th International Conference on Heritage/Community Languages, held at UCLA on Feb. 27-28:
  • Esra Eldem-Tunç, JK Subramony, Metehan Oğuz, Seoyoon Hong, Leo Mermelstein, Julian Patiño & Zuzanna Fuchs. The Role of Null vs. Overt Agreement Markers in Spanish Heritage Speakers’ Processing of Gender.
  • Zuzanna Fuchs, Emma Kealey, Esra Eldem-Tunç, Anna Runova, Leo Mermelstein & Julian Patiño. The Role of Noun Transparency in Processing of Gender during Spoken Word Recognition.

Spring into Ling with USiL

This week USiL hosted Spring into Ling. Faculty and graduate students joined the undergraduates in a game of SC-Lingo (USC Linguistics Bingo)!

Upcoming Events

Department Events

• Monday, March 9 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: TBD
• Tuesday, March 10 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: Open house poster session, featuring…
  • Esra Eldem-Tunç, “Addressing the Silent Problem: Heritage Speakers’ Interpretation of Anaphora under Verbal Ellipsis”
  • Haley Hsu, “On semantic illusions and the limits of attention: Fallibility in linguistic processing”
  • Emma Kealey, “Predicting facilitative processing of gender in Heritage Spanish using measures of lexical proficiency”
  • Mete Oğuz, “Processing Turkish Case Markers: Frequency vs. Morphosyntactic Complexity”
  • Linh Pham, “Dynamic language transfer in bilingualism: How L1 Vietnamese L2 English speakers process filler-gap dependencies in English”
  • Anna Runova, “Perception and production of gender-marking vowels in heritage Russian”
• Wednesday, March 11 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: Andy Murphy

USiL Events

Undergraduate Students in Linguistics is holding Weekly General Meetings on Wednesdays from 6-8pm in GFS 330. All interested undergraduates are encouraged to attend—no prerequisites necessary. If one evening meeting a week leaves you craving more, never fear: the Recursion Reading Group meets on Tuesdays from 8:00-9:00pm to discuss the intersection of language, AI, and more!

If you have news to share, please submit your news for future issues of SCling Wrap, cause we need your help keeping up with what’s ✨fresh✨ at USC Linguistics.

Happy Lunar New Year!

Last week, the graduate students celebrated Lunar New Year with dimsum lunch at Golden Dragon restaurant at Chinatown, followed by walking in the Chinatown New Year parade. Spot the familiar faces: Zhi Zheng, Jyothi Nellakra, Yingu Su, JK Subramony, Peter O’Neill, Sean Foley, Natsumi Taniguchi, Haley Hsu, and Darby Grachek, along with special guest appearances by Jack Goldberg, Jenny (Sean’s wife), and Ryan (Su’s husband).

PoMMLab hosts Prof. Thane

The USC PoMMLab hosted Prof. Patrick Thane (University of Texas at Austin) on Thursday, Feb. 26. Prof. Thane met with students in the lab, and he also gave a guest lecture in Zuzanna Fuchs‘s LING 410 Second Language Acquisition course, speaking to the undergraduate students about his research on heritage language acquisition in dual language bilingual education programs. You can read more about Prof. Thane’s research here.

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

• Andrew Simpson and Linh Pham. “Vietnamese and the typology of argument ellipsis.” 6th Annual Meeting of the International Symposium on Vietnamese Linguistics, held at Venice University, Italy, February 26-27.

Upcoming Events

Department Events

• Monday, March 2 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: Khalil Iskarous, professionalization session on journal letter writing
• Tuesday, March 3 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab
  • Haley Hsu, “Resource allocation in non-native speech processing and error detection”
  • JK Subramony, “Exploring Implicit Causality Effects on Cataphoric Pronouns”
• Wednesday, March 4 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: Zhendong Liu, “The Semantics of Direct Evidentials in Rngaba Amdo Tibetan”
• Friday, March 6 at 1pm @ MeaningLab: JK Subramony, title TBD

USiL Events

Undergraduate Students in Linguistics is holding Weekly General Meetings on Wednesdays from 6-8pm in GFS 330. All interested undergraduates are encouraged to attend—no prerequisites necessary. If one evening meeting a week leaves you craving more, never fear: the Recursion Reading Group meets on Tuesdays from 8:00-9:00pm to discuss the intersection of language, AI, and more!