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.