Pedro Mateo spent the summer (and is currently) working on the ‘Documenting the Acquisition of Mayan Languages’ project, headed by Dr. Clifton Pye.  This summer he recorded Q’anjob’al children from Santa Eulalia, Guatemala.       

Pedro is analyzing data of three Q’anjob’al children to evaluate how they acquire the verb morphology.

      A child in the process of natively acquiring Q'anjob'al

                   (and being recorded while doing so)

Pedro (left) and a Q'anjob'al speaker working together

Pedro trained a (fellow) native speaker of Q’anjob’al

on how to do data transcription.

Michelle Bridges was awarded a Foreign Language Area Scholarship (FLAS) to spend the summer in Xinjiang in western China studying Uyghur.  While in Urumchi, she took Uyghur classes, conducted fieldwork on Uyghur and did a great deal of suffixing. 

Jie Zhang and Yuwen Lai spent the summer of 2007 with Yuwen Lai, collecting data for experiments on Beijing Mandarin tone sandhi and Beijing Mandarin tone identification using the gating paradigm at Beijing University.

                   Moon Near Blake Hall 730AM

In July 2007 Joan Sereno was at the University of Konstanz in Germany as an invited scientist.  While in Germany, she presented "English lexical stress cues in native English and non-native Arabic speakers" at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) in Saarbrucken Germany with Wael Zuraiq (2005 Ph.D. KU)

Kelly Berkson spent the month of June at the American Indian Language Development Institute in Tucson, Arizona, practicing her transcription  skills with a Zuni speaker and working on digital story-telling projects with Zuni and Tohono O'odham speakers.  She also team-taught a half-hour immersion class in Tututdinae, an Athabaskan language from southwestern Oregon which she does not yet speak but is learning.

Graduations

Doctoral Dissertations

Sabri Al-Shboul graduated this spring after defending his doctoral dissertation titled, On Defaultness in Jordanian Arabic.  Dr. Shboul has returned to Zarqa, Jordan, where he is teaching at The Hashemite University.

Abdullah Jaradat finished his dissertation, A Linguistic Analysis of Jordanian Proverbs; a Syntactic, Semantical and Contextual Study, in the spring of this year.

Kazumi Maniwa came back to town to defend her dissertation Acoustics and perception of clear fricatives in the spring.  She is currently holds a postdoctoral position at the University of Konstanz in Germany.

Khalaf Al-Shammiry successfully defended his  dissertation, The Clause Structure of Turaif Arabic in Spring 2007.  He has returned home to Saudi Arabia and is teaching at King Saad University in the College of Languages and Translation.

Master’s Theses

Mohammad Murad graduated this spring after completing his Master’s thesis A Sociolinguistic Investigation of Language Attitudes of Iraqi Native Speakers of Arabic.

Saad Al-Dossari has returned to Saudi Arabia after defending his Master’s thesis Acquisition of English Unaccusative Verbs by Arabic Native Speakers.

Craig Turnbull-Sailor has graduated after defending his thesis, Syntactic Patterns of Embedded Wh-Clauses.  Craig is going to be pursuing a Ph.D at UCLA Linguistics starting Fall 2007.

Wang Jing is now pursuing her Ph.D at the University of Pittsburgh.  In Spring 2007, she defended her thesis The Second Language Acquisition of the Chinese Aspect marker le and gave a colloquoy in the department.

Undergraduate Honors

Rachel Costello successfully defended her undergraduate honors thesis Transfer of Word Order in the Acquisition of L2 English and L2 Spanish under the tutelage of Alison Gabriele.

Ella Fund-Reznicek has been accepted into the Honors Research Development Program and the University Scholars Program.

Talks

Alison Gabriele presented

work on the acquisition of

telicity by Japanese learners

of English at GASLA 9 at the

University of Iowa. A few

weeks later, at the International

Symposium on Bilingualism in

Hamburg, Germany she

participated in a special

session on the acquisition

of tense and aspect by first

and second language learners.

This fall Alison will present

new work on the acquisition

of aspect by Chinese learners

of English at EUROSLA

(Newcastle, United Kingdom),

 the Second Language

Research Forum (UIUC) and

the Boston University Conference

on Language Development.

The papers are co-authored

by Junko Maekawa

(KU post-doc), Erik Christensen

 (KU linguistics major) and

Lindsay Ignatowski (KU linguistics alum).

Zhang, Jie and Yuwen Lai  presented a talk on Two aspects of productivity in Taiwanese double reduplication at the 15^th annual conference of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (in conjunction with the 19^th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics) at Columbia University in New York this spring.

In Spring 2007, Zhang, Jie, Yuwen Lai, and Craig Turnbull-Sailor presented "Effects of phonetics and frequency on the productivity of Taiwanese tone sandhi" at CLS.

Harold Torrence presented a talk on Wolof relative clauses at the Annual Conference on African Linguistics held at the University of Florida in March. 

Eva Rodríguez González (Ph.D. 2006) accepted an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Miami University of Ohio.

Our (now former) department chair, Sara Rosen, has been appointed Associate Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies.  Allard Jongman is the new chair.

Melissa Stamer (M.A. 2006) was accepted into the doctorate program in Curriculum and Teaching in the School of Education at KU.

Saad Al-Dwayan advanced to Ph.D candidacy this spring after defending his dissertation prospectus "The processing of a filled gap position in English wh-sentences by Najdi Speakers: Investigating L1 Transfer".

                               Mr. Saad Al-Dwayan

Wendy Herd received second place in the Student Paper Award from the Acoustical Society of America ( and $200) for her poster, "Incomplete neutralization of /t/ and /d/ in flapping environments: An analysis of the North Midland dialect of American English", which she presented at the Spring 2007 meeting in Salt Lake City.  The paper can be accessed at

"Wendy’s prize-winning paper!"

Jie Zhang was presented with the Young Scholar Award from the International Association of Chinese Linguistics this spring.

Alison Gabriele received a GRF award for her project Interfaces in Second Language Acquisition. Junko Maekawa and Pepe Aleman-Bañon will work as

research assistants on the project.

Harold Torrence received a New Faculty General Research Fund grant.  His project, Syntactic and Morphological Structures of Pulaar

will take him back to Senegal in the summer of 2008.

Allard Jongman is now an Associate Editor of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Pedro Mateo Pedro received the Schiefelbusch Child Language Scholarship in May 2007.

From the General Research Fund, Jie Zhang received a grant to investigate "Testing the productivity of tone sandhi in Beijing and Tianjin Mandarin."  The project will begin in 2007 and continue into 2008.  For the summer of 2008, Zhang received an International Travel Grant for Humanities Research through the International Programs office at KU and a Faculty Research Abroad Travel grant from the KU Center for East Asian Studies.  The monies were used to fund his travel for fieldwork in China.

Kristi Bond won a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.  The fellowship, which includes tuition and a monthly stipend is for three years.  Kristi will be researching L2 sentence processing using event‑related potentials (ERPs).

Noa Isabel Maniwa Wade was born to Kazumi Maniwa (Ph.D 2007) and Travis Wade (Ph.D 2003) on November 22, 2007. 

                                                 Noa Isabel Maniwa-Wade