Hugo and Grant present at WCCFL 44 in Mexico City!

The 44th annual West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics took place at UNAM in Mexico City this year, and Hugo and Grant presented recent work from our lab there. 

Hugo's presentation:  Wh-in-situ and scope positions: the case of wh-islands and D-linking in Cantonese

Grant's presentation:
¡Minimality sí, phases no! Evidence from COMP-trace and D-linking effects

Unsub and Hugo present at HSP at MIT!

Both Unsub Shin and Hugo Pau presented posters at the 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, held in March at MIT.

• Unsub's poster was entitled Cross-linguistic differences in filler-gap dependencies: the role of definiteness in English and Korean.

• Hugo's poster was entitled The absence of D-linking effects in Cantonese wh-islands.

Winter 2026 lab meetings

Our meetings this quarter will be on Thursdays, 11:00 - 12:20

January 15

We start the new year right with this interesting new article on wh-in-situ in French and Chinese:

Pablos Robles, L., Yang, Y., Doetjes, J., & Cheng, L. L.-S. (2025). Do readers anticipate wh-in-situ questions? Cross-linguistic reading time evidence from Mandarin Chinese and French. Applied Psycholinguistics, 46, e9. Cambridge Core.by the https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716425000074

January 22

The wh-in-situ literature just won't stop! So of course we have to read it.

Lo, C. W., & Brennan, J. R. (2021). EEG correlates of long-distance dependency formation in Mandarin wh-questions. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 15, 591613.  https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.591613

January 29

This week we take a foray into the non-experimental literature with this recent article on phases vs. intervention in accounting for successive cyclicity:

Keine, S., & Zeijlstra, H. (2025). Clause-internal successive cyclicity: Phasality or DP intervention?. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 1119-1182. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-024-09627-3

February 5

This week we'll do quick previews of three experiments in the lab that are about to happen: 

• Scrambling in Korean (Unsub)
• Wh-in-situ in Cantonese (Hugo)
• That-trace in English (Grant and Claire), if time permits

February 12

We'll return to the Keine & Zeijlstra (2025) article this week, looking particularly at the discussion of Dinka and Defaka in the last half of the paper.

February 19

This week we'll talk about this recent article, which argues that "filler-gap" dependencies are actually dependencies between the filler and the head, not a gap:

da Cunha, Y., & Gibson, E. (2025). Syntactic Complexity Phenomena Are Better Explained Without Empty Elements Mediating Long‐Distance Dependencies. Cognitive Science, 49(8), e70088. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/cogs.70088

February 26

Hugo and Unsub will give us previews of their upcoming posters at HSP!  

March 5

Unsub and Grant will each give us sneak peeks at the results from the experiments they've been running this quarter.

March 12

Robert will finish out the quarter with some thoughts on his recent work. 

Fall 2025 lab meetings

 Our meetings this quarter will be on Wednesdays, 12:00 - 1:30

October 8

We'll start the quarter with this recent article on wh-in-situ:

Nozomi Tanaka; Subliminal Island Effects in Japanese Complex NPs with Argument wh-in-situ. Linguistic Inquiry 2025;  https://doi.org/10.1162/LING.a.542

October 15

Can't believe we haven't read this already, but we're catching up:

Pañeda, C., Villata, S., Kush, D. & Sprouse, J., (2024) “A translation-matched, experimental comparison of three types of wh-island effects in Spanish and English”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 9(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.11164

October 22

Grant will lead a discussion of "What I did over summer vacation," based on a project that he Ezgi and Claire have been working on over the last several months. We will see (1) some highlights of the major findings of the experiments and some hints of what the theoretical implications might be (though we'll save a deeper discussion of that for another day), (2) what happens when you run exactly the same experiment twice, under different circumstances with two different populations, and (3) a variety of cool analytical tricks you can do once you have the results from almost any experiment.

October 29

We'll discuss this recent article week:

Bruening, Benjamin & Tollan, Rebecca. 2025. Reconstruction in wh movement: the view from lexical reactivation. Syntactic Theory and Research 1.1.4. https://doi.org/10.16995/star.17373.

November 5

Hugo will present a practice talk on Cantonese wh-in-situ that he will be giving soon at CAMP[8].

November 12

We continue our Fall wh-in-situ festival!

Pham, Linh, and Elsi Kaiser. 2025. “Constructing Dependencies With Optional Elements: Insights from Vietnamese”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 10 (1): 5951. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v10i1.5951.

November 19

We'll discuss a recent article on filler-gap processing in Norwegian:

Kobzeva, A. and Kush, D. 2024. Grammar and expectation in filler-gap dependency resolution: Experimental and modelling evidence from Norwegian. Cognitive Science 48, e13501.

December 3

For our final meeting of the quarter:

Kobzeva, A., Sant, C., Robbins, P.T., Vos, M., Lohndal, T. and Kush, D. 2022. Comparing island effects for different dependency types in Norwegian. Languages 7, 197.

Maho publishes in NLLT!

Maho and Grant just published an open-access article in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory entitled "Relative clauses are islands in Japanese: The case of double relatives". Based on Maho's dissertation work, the article presents a new way of thinking about cross-linguistic variation in island phenomena.

No regular lab meetings in Spring quarter

Grant will be teaching a graduate seminar this quarter where we'll all be reading and discussing articles and presenting research in progress. In short, we'll be doing the sorts of things we usually do in lab meetings, so we won't have lab meetings this quarter unless a special need arises. The topic of the seminar is A'-movement, and it is open to everyone, whether you're enrolled or not!

Winter 2025 lab meetings

 Our meetings this quarter will be Fridays 12:00 - 1:30.

January 17

We'll continue our discussion from last quarter on the upcoming article by Shen and Lim in Syntax about extraction from DPs.

January 24

We'll have a special guest presentation at a special time (11:00): 

"Testing language models’ syntactic sensitivity to grammatical constraints: A case study of wanna contraction"

      Kangsan Noh, Korea University

      Sanghoun Song, Korea University

      Eunjeong Oh, Sangmyung University

February 14

Grant will lead a discussion of "Post-experiment number crunching: how to go from raw results to results that you can begin to interpret".

February 22

We'll discuss this recent NLLT article on extraction out of NPs:

Tollan, R., Doroudiani, B. & Heller, D. Effects of uniqueness on extraction from definite NP objects. Nat Lang Linguist Theory (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-024-09643-3

February 29

Practice talks for Open House.

March 7

We'll discuss another recent NLLT article, this time on wh-in-situ:

Jin, D., Yan, H. Reassessing the argument–adjunct asymmetry in wh-in-situ islands in Mandarin: An experimental investigation. Nat Lang Linguist Theory  (2024).  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-024-09638-0

March 14

After our break last week, we'll return to this recent NLLT article on wh-in-situ:

Jin, D., Yan, H. Reassessing the argument–adjunct asymmetry in wh-in-situ islands in Mandarin: An experimental investigation. Nat Lang Linguist Theory  (2024).  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-024-09638-0