2009

November 2009

• The 19th Japanese-Korean Linguistics Conference, the most selective and prestigious international meeting on the Japanese and Korean languages, took place at the University of Hawaii this past weekend.  Four papers were presented by members of the Department of Linguistics, including graduate students Bodo Winter, So-Young Kim and Heeyeon Dennison, and faculty members Amy Schafer and William O'Grady.

September 2009

• Ph.D. student Nian Liu has been presented a paper "Systematic Linguistic Coding Facilitates Children's Lexical Acquisition" at the annual meeting of the Japanese Cognitive Linguistics Association (JCLA) at the University of Kyoto (Yoshida Campus) in Kyoto, Japan from September 26^th  - 27^th , 2009.

August 2009

• Ph.D. student Manami Sato has been awarded the Graduate Student Travel Grant of $998.20 from the Center for Japanese Studies for the presentation of a conference paper "Sustainability Factors of Simulation Perspective in Language Comprehension" at the annual meeting of the Japanese Cognitive Linguistics Association (JCLA) at the University of Kyoto (Yoshida Campus) in Kyoto, Japan from September 26^th - 27^th, 2009.
• Ph.D. student Carl Polley has been awarded a Fulbright U.S. Student scholarship to Taiwan in Linguistics from the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.  He will conduct research as a visiting predoctoral scholar at National Taiwan University (NTU) from January to September, 2010, and will study advanced Mandarin at NTU's International Chinese Language Program.

June 2009

• Nicholas Thieberger was invited and funded to present and consult on building 'The Archive of the Indigenous Languages and Cultures of South East Asia' at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
• Ph.D. student Jake Terrell received a grant for $13,150 from the Endangered Languages Documentation Program (London).  He will focus on documenting the speech and ceremonies of the Akha shaman.  This religious register is not mutually intelligible with spoken Akha (Lolo-Burbese), and it is highly endangered.  There are only 7 shaman in Thailand out a population of some 100,000 Akha, and all are very elderly.
• Ph.D. student Nian Liu presented her research paper "Linguistic coding of temporal terms affects children's acquisition of temporal concepts" at the 2^nd Conference of the Swedish Association for Language and Cognition.  Right after the conference, Nian was invited by Dr. Jurgis Skilters to do a comparative multi-linguistic acquisition study at the Center for Cognition Sciences and Semantics, University of Lativia.
• Valerie Guerin (Ph.D., 2008) has been hired to teach linguistics in the Department of English at Texas Tech University.  Last year, Valerie taught linguistic anthropology courses at Texas Tech.

May 2009

• Ph.D. student Heeyeon Y. Dennison will receive a Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant (PI: Advisor Amy Schafer) from the National Science Foundation for her dissertation "Processing Implied Meaning through Contrastive Prosody".
• Ph.D. students Kanjana Thepboriruk and Jake Terrell each presented papers at the annual Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS) conference held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.  SEALS is the largest international conference dedicated to the study of Southeast Asian languages.

April 2009

• Sang-Yee Cheon (Ph.D., 2005) assistant professor of Korean, has received a 2009 Board of Regents Excellence in Teaching Award.  This prestigious award honors faculty for their subject mastery, teaching effectiveness, and creativity.  Sang-Yee will be recognized at a special award ceremony to be held in September.  Congratulations Sang-Yee.
• MA student James A. Crippen will present "People, weather, places, thoughts: Evidence for the areal prefix in Tlingit" at the 2009 Athabaskan Languages Conference in July at the University of California, Berkeley.  He also received the Language in the USA fellowship from the Linguistic Society of America to attend the 2009 Linguistic Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.
• Ph.D. student Manami Sato has had her paper, "Ephemeral nature of perspective in simulation" (co-authored with Dan Hall and Ben Bergen), accepted for presentation at the Embodied and Situated Language Processing (ESLP) conference in Rotterdam, the Netherlands this July.

March 2009

• The UH Ling Dept was represented in three presentations at the 22^nd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, March 26-28, 2009, Davis, CA.  The CUNY Conference is the leading national and international forum for research on sentence comprehension and production.

On-Soon Lee "Korean adults' comprehension of negated disjunction and the role of topic marker."

Hyekyung Hwang (Ph.D., 2007, now at Mcgill University), Amy Schafer & Karsten Steinhauer "Implicit prosody effects of constituent length on ambiguity resolution during silent reading: Behavioral and ERP evidence from Korean"

Heeyeon Y. Dennision & Amy Schafer "Implied meaning through contrastive prosody: Evidence from sentence continuation and picture naming"

• Dr. John Lynch (Ph.D., 1974) has been elected honorary member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in recognition of his career-long work on the languages of the Pacific.  Professor and Director of the Pacific Languages Unit at the University of the South Pacific, Dr. Lynch is recognized as a leading specialist on the languages of Vanuatu.  He is currently serving as editor of Oceanic Linguistics, a journal founded by our department and published by the University of Hawaii Press.
• Dr. Ritsuko Kikusawa (Ph.D., 2000) has received the Ralph Chikato Honda Distinguished Scholar Award.  Dr. Kikusawa is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Advanced Studies in Anthropology, National Museum of Ethnology (Osaka), and at the Department of Comparative Studies of the Graduate University of Advanced Studies (Kanagawa).  She is a prolific writer and scholar in oceanic linguistics and langagues, and in 2008, she received the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Prize.  In addition, she was honored with the Japanese Society for Oceanic Studies Award for Best Publication by Young Scholars of the Year in 2005.
• Ph.D. student Toshiaki Furukawa will present a paper co-authored with SLS graduate student Gavin Furukawa at this summer's 11^th International Pragmatics Conference, to be held in Melbourne, Australia.  This is the leading conference in the field of pragmatics.
• Dr. Katsura Aoyama (Ph.D., 2000) has receive tenure and promotioin to the rank of associate professor in the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at Texas Tech University.  A specialist in the experimental investigation of language acquisition, Katsura helped set new standard for graduate student excellence while in our Ph.D. program.  We congraduate her on her latest successess.
• Ph.D. students Heeyeon Dennison and On-Soon Lee, recent Ph.D. graduate Hyekyung Hwang (now at McGill University) and Professor Amy Scafer will give three presentations atht his year's CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, the leading national conference on sentence processing.

 February 2009

• William O'Grady gave two invited talks to the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University earlier this month, one on second language acquisition and the other the interpretation of quantifier scope in Korean-American bilingual children.
• Ben Bergen has been invited to teach at the summer's Linguistic Society of America Linguistic Institute, to be held at the Berkeley campus of the University of California.  Dr. Bergen received this prestigious appointment to teach a course entitled 'Experimental and corpus-based approaches to metaphor' a subject on which he has published extensively.
• Ph.D. student Hunter Hatfield will present work at the 11^th International Pragmatics Conference in July of 2009 in Melbourne, Australia.  His work revolves around apology use in Korea and the U.S. and is done with Dr. Jeewon Hahn of Kyunghee University, who received her Ph.D. from the department in 2006.  Hunter will take the lead in the presentation entitled "The Concept of Face: Implications of Korean apologies."  Dr. Hahn will take the lead in presenting a poster, entitled "Variation in Apology Use through Studying Group Face."

January 2009

• Ph.D. student Heeyeon Dennison and Associate Professor Amy Schafer gave an invited talk, "On the interpretation of prosodically marked contrast in sentence comprehension", in Potsdam, Germany at Experimental Studies on Intonation: Phonetic, Phonological and Psycholinguistic Aspects of Sentence Prosody.  This forum brought together some of the world's experts in prosody research for some very lively discussion on the topic.
• Associate Professor Ben Bergen presented a series of invited lectures on "Advances in Embodied Cognitive Linguistics" at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
• The first issue of the new Journal Language and Cognition (published by Mouton) has just appeared.  Associate Professor Ben Bergen is a member of the Editiorial Board.
• Ph.D. student Jennie Tran and Dr. Laura Sacia (Ph.D., 2007) will each be presenting papers at the Conference on Languages of Southeast Asia, to be held at the UCLA this month.  Jennie was a recipient of a major NSF grant for her pioneering dissertation research on the acquisition of Vietnamese.

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