#  Week of Oct 6 

 





October 06, 2025

 

 

## **Harvard at AMP**

The Annual Meeting on Phonology 2025 took place at the University of California, Berkeley from 25-27 September, featuring a strong presence from Harvard phonologists and their outstanding presentations!

Fifth-year student Aljoša Milenković and our faculty Kevin Ryan gave a talk titled ‘Stress-tone-weight interaction in poetic metre: South Slavic folk metre revisited’. Fourth-year student Jian Cui presented her project ‘Investigating the Tone-Segment Asymmetry in Phonological Counting: A Learnability Experiment’, co-authored with Hanna Shine (Snedeker Lab, Harvard), Jesse Snedeker (affiliated faculty in linguistics; Snedeker Lab, Harvard), and Youngah Do (HKU).

Alumnus Gašper Beguš (currently Associate Professor at UC Berkeley) also presented a poster on ‘The phonology of sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) coda vowels’, in collaboration with the Project CETI team. Moreover, this year’s AMP special session on ‘Deep Phonology: Doing phonology with deep learning’ was also organised by Gašper.

Well done, Harvard phonologists! 👏

 ![Milenković and Ryan at AMP](/sites/g/files/omnuum5001/files/2025-10/amp-talk.jpeg)

 

*(Aljoša and Kevin giving their talk. Photo from: Kevin Ryan)* ![Group photo of Harvard linguists](/sites/g/files/omnuum5001/files/2025-10/amp-group.jpeg)

 

*(Group photo of Harvard linguists! From left to right: Gašper Beguš, Bruce Hayes, Kevin Ryan, Aljoša Milenković, Jian Cui, and Madeleine Riskin-Kutz. Photo from: Kevin Ryan)*## **Marantz at the Harvard Linguistics Colloquium Talk Series**

The first talk for Harvard Linguistics Colloquium Talk Series of the semester was given by Alec Marantz (NYU) on Friday 26 September. The talk was titled 'Syntax Beyond Merge: Objects'. Thank you so much for the great talk, Alec!

 ![Marantz talk](/sites/g/files/omnuum5001/files/2025-10/marantz-talk.jpg)

 

## **LangCog** 

The next LangCog meeting will be **Tuesday, 10/7** from **5:30-7:00pm,** in **William James Hall, Room 1550**. The speaker is Ryan O'Leary (Northeastern), and the title and abstract of their talk can be found below. You can find the schedule for the remainder of the semester on the LangCog [website](https://sites.harvard.edu/langcog/).

**Title:** Flexibility and limits of spoken language comprehension under perceptual challenge

**Abstract:** In spoken communication, successful comprehension depends not only on the linguistic information itself but also on the quality of the perceptual input that carries it. When the acoustic speech signal is degraded through alterations in rate, spectral content, or listener-specific factors such as hearing loss, the cognitive systems supporting comprehension must adapt. This talk will focus on a series of experiments that examine how listeners manage these challenges, with a particular focus on how changes to the input shape both online processing and downstream memory. Using a combination of pupillometry (moment-to-moment changes in pupil diameter thought to track cognitive effort), drift–diffusion modeling (to model speed-accuracy tradeoffs), and behavioral measures of accuracy and recall, these studies examine how different forms of signal perturbation (e.g., time-compression, noise-vocoding) interact with linguistic complexity and task demands. Taken together, these studies emphasize the flexibility of language processing under perceptual constraints and hint at perceptual limits under which comprehension can succeed.



 

 

 



 

 

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