Week of Apr 27

Hande Sevgi Thesis Defence

Hande Sevgi is defending her thesis 'Manner Modification Across Modalities: Insights from Gesture, Sign, and Spoken Language' this Thursday, April 30 at 10:00–12:30 in Boylston 105. Refreshments immediately following the defence in the Department of Linguistics, Boylston Hall Lounge 

Hope to see lots of you there!

Spring 2026 Reception

The Department of Linguistics will host the Spring Reception 2026 on Friday, 1 May, from 12:00–1:30pm in the department lounge on the 3rd floor of Boylston Hall.

Please join us for refreshments, and conversation with undergrad and grad students, staff, and faculty. All are very welcome, and feel free to drop by at any point during the reception. See you then! 

Senior Thesis Colloquium

The Department of Linguistics will host this year’s Senior Thesis Colloquium next Friday, May 1, from 10:15—12:00 in Boylston Hall 105.

The colloquium will feature presentations by our senior thesis writers on their thesis projects, followed by time for questions. Please find the schedule in the flyer below. All are very welcome to attend.

Daria Bikina Thesis Defence

Warm congratulations to the final-year student Daria Bikina on successfully defending her PhD.

We’re delighted to celebrate this milestone, and all the work that led to her dissertation, ‘Fine-tuning (in)definiteness in the absence of articles: Experimental investigation of Russian’. We would also like to thank all her collaborators along the way.

Please join us in congratulating Dr Bikina!

LangCog

The next LangCog meeting of the semester will be Tuesday, April 28, from 5:30-7:00pm, in William James Hall, Room 1550. The speaker is Moshe Poliak (MIT BCS), and the title and abstract of the talk can be found below. You can find the schedule for the remainder of the semester on the LangCog website. Food will be provided, as always!

Title: Word informativity drives acoustic enhancement

Abstract: In speech, we often produce the same word multiple times, yet the acoustic realization differs somewhat each time. Can this variability be entirely explained away by random variation in speech production, or are there some general cognitive principles that could explain why the same word would be produced differently in different contexts? In this talk, I will present evidence that, at the word level, the more informative a word is, the more acoustically enhanced it becomes, as measured by increased duration, pitch, and loudness. I will present findings from Clark et al. (2025, Cognitive Science), showing that, in natural conversation, surprisal predicts acoustic enhancement on the group level as well as within individual participants. I will then show a cross-linguistic comparison using an experimental manipulation of word informativity—eliciting utterances with corrective prosody—across 9 languages from 5 unrelated language families. We find that, across all languages, corrective prosody is realized with increased duration, pitch, and loudness. Finally, I'll present a study in English where the informativity of the correction itself was manipulated, finding that more surprising corrections benefit from additional acoustic enhancement. Together, these results suggest a potential cognitive, cross-linguistic principle in language production: the more informative a word is, the more a speaker will acoustically enhance it.