Recent News
In March, Professor Emily M. Bender participated in an event titled "The Great Chatbot Debate," hosted by the Computer History Museum (Mountain View, CA) and co-organized by IEEE Spectrum.
In the debate moderated by IEEE's Eliza Strickland, Bender went up against OpenAI's Dr. Sébastien Bubeck over the question "Do LLMs Understand?"
Bender highlighted the relevance of linguistics to understanding both how LLMs work and why their illusion of… Read more
We are pleased to introduce four PhD students who joined the department in Fall 2024. They each have unique backgrounds and research interests, and we are excited to see what they accomplish over the next few years!
Ryan Chon
Ryan has a general interest in endangered and minority languages. At Boston University, he researched language attitudes in Northern Italy and the historical phonology of the Pahoturi languages of Papua New Guinea. At UW, his research will explore how… Read more
Congratulations to Ella De Falco on receiving the 2024-2025 Graduate Research Excellence Award!
Ella’s research investigates the acoustics of emotion in speech. Her dissertation work focuses on the intersection of phonetics, affective science, and computational linguistics. She is currently analyzing the acoustic correlates of emotion from several corpora designed for speech emotion recognition. During the 2024-2025 academic year, she has also begun to create… Read more
Congratulations to Kaveri Sheth on receiving the 2024-2025 Graduate Research Excellence Award! Here's more about Kaveri’s research in her own words:
"During Summer 2024, I conducted my final dissertation study that built on what I have been working on at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (ILABS) for the past 4 years. I used a research-based teacher training developed by Pat Kuhl and Naja Ferjan Ramírez, called SparkLing™, to train educators on the… Read more
Congratulations to Richard Wright on becoming the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Phonetica!
Phonetica is an international forum for phonetic science that addresses all aspects of the subject matter including phonetic descriptions, articulatory and signal analytic measures of production, perception, acquisition, and phonetic variation and change.
Contemporary interdisciplinary research on phonetics employs a wide range of methodological approaches to… Read more
We are proud to host the 43rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 43), which will take place April 25-27, 2025. The program is now available and registration is open!
The West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, or WCCFL (pronounced /ˈwɪkfəl/), is an annual linguistics conference held at a university in western North America. Research presented at WCCFL can focus… Read more
Graduate student Jessica Luo is the 2024-2025 recipient of the Arienne Dwyer Language Documentation Award, made possible by a fund generously established in 2022 by UW Linguistics affiliate faculty member, Arienne Dwyer.
Luo will receive from the fund to assist with dissertation research expenses. Luo’s dissertation, supervised by Myriam Lapierre, is focused on Wu dialects. She plans to spend most of 2025-2026 documenting two under-studied Sanmen dialect and Xinchang dialect of Wu Chinese (wuu… Read more
Congratulations to Trent Ukasick on receiving the 2024 Graduate Research Excellence Award! Here's more about Trent’s research in his own words:
"I received the Department Excellence Award for Autumn 2024, which has helped enormously with my research. The award gave me the opportunity to focus full time on writing my dissertation and has allowed me to stay on track for my expected defense in Spring 2025.
During the 2023-2024 academic year, I carried out fieldwork in China, where I developed an… Read more
Our students and faculty have been busy during fall quarter! Here are some hightlights:
Ty Gill-Saucier presented a poster ‘A primer into the lexical and phonological origins and roots of Mississippi Gulf Coast French: A study based on Linguistic Atlases at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 52 (NWAV) in Miami Beach, Florida.
Andrew Hedding, together with Michele Yuan from UCLA, presented a talk "Distinct pathways to possessor A’-… Read more
Congratulations to Alicia Beckford Wassink on being elected the Vice President/President-Elect of the Linguistic Society of America. The LSA, established in 1924, is the oldest and most prominent professional association of linguists in the United States, whose mission is to advance the scientific study of language and to disseminate linguistics scholarship for the advancement of knowledge and the betterment of society.
In… Read more