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Lab News (click here for archived news)

  • [new!] Utako Minai has been awarded the 2021 Byron A. Alexander Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award, given to honor a faculty member in the College who demonstrates exceptional effort, care, and guidance in the advisement of graduate students (May, 2021)
  • [new!] Tingting Wang, Nick Feroce, Jesus Briseno and Utako Minai presented a study "Seeking the sources of children’s comprehension errors involving the universal quantifier every" at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America, with Dr. Kate Coughlin. (May, 2021)
  • [new!] Katherine Patz, a winnder of Undergraduate Research Award Spring 2021, presented her honors project in Linguistics titled "Analyzing Syntactic Structure of Question Sentences by Simultaneous Bilingual Children Acquiring English and Japanese", mentored by Utako Minai, at the Undergraduate Research Symposium. (April, 2021)
  • [new!] Ayumi Nobuki and Utako Minai presented a poster "Pragmatic felicity of negation in Japanese" at the 2021 SRCD Virtual Biennial Meeting. (April, 2021)
  • Tingting Wang, Nick Feroce, Jesus Briseno and Utako Minai presented a study "Examining the origins of errors in processing the quantifier every: an eye-tracking study" at the 2020 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, to be held at the Universiyt of Massachusetts, Amherst, with Dr. Kate Coughlin. (March, 2020)
  • Xiao Yang presented updated results of her NSF-supported dissertation work "Temporal mismatch guides the prediction of Mandarin relative clauses: Evidence from ERPs" at the 2020 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, to be held at the Universiyt of Massachusetts, Amherst, with Drs. Robert Fiorentino, Alison Gabriele, Stephen Politzer-Ahles and Utako Minai. (March, 2020)
  • Xiao Yang presented preliminary results of her NSF-supported dissertation work "Temporal mismatches guide the prediction of Mandarin relative clauses: An ERP study" at the International Brain and Syntax Think Tank, held at the Northwestern University, with Drs. Robert Fiorentino, Alison Gabriele, Stephen Politzer-Ahles and Utako Minai. (October, 2019)
  • Xiao Yang has been awarded the 2019 KU Emily Taylor Center Outstanding International Woman Student award. This award recognizes a woman-identified graduate or undergraduate international student for her academic achievement and contributions to the campus or community. (April, 2019)
  • Xiao Yang has been awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant for her dissertation project titled "Examining the linguistic cues that guide prediction in the processing of Mandarin relative clauses: An ERP study", co-PIed with Utako Minai, Drs. Robert Fiorentino and Alison Gabriele (KU Linguistics). (March, 2019)
  • Utako Minai has been awarded a grant from the Rice Child Language Doctoral Program Fund, established by Dr. Mabel Rice (Distinguished Professor at KU's Child Language Doctoral Program). The grant supports a collaborative project with lab members, Erin Andres, Claire Selin and Tingting Wang, which is on children's quantifier comprehension and the role of their cognitive development. (January, 2019)
  • Xiao Yang and Utako Minai has published a co-authored article titled "Context-sensitivity and individual differences in the derivation of scalar implicature" with Dr. Robert Fiorentino (KU Linguistics) in Frontiers in Psychology. (November, 2018)
  • A former lab member Chia-Ying Chu (Children's Hearing Center, Taiwan) and Utako Minai published an article "Children's demonstrative comprehension and the role of non-linguistic cognitive abilities: a cross-linguistic study" in the Special Issue of Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, "Experimental Approaches to the Study of Child Language: A Cross-linguistic Perspective". (November, 2018)
  • A former lab member Lauren Covey (Montclair State U.) and Utako Minai published an article "An eye-tracking study examining the role of question-answer congruency in children's comprehension of only: a preliminary report" in Kansas Working paper in Linguistics Volume 39 with Dr. Kate Coughlin (KU Linguistics). (October, 2018)
  • Utako Minai delivered two invited talks in Japan: Invited symposium on syntax and semantics in child language acquisition at the Japanese Society for Language Sciences 20th Annual International Conference (JSLS2018) held at Bunkyo Gakuin University, and the 8th international workshop on comparative syntax and language acquisition at Nanzan University. (August, 2018)
  • A former lab member Breanna Krueger (U. of Wyoming) and Utako Minai published an article "The influence of misarticulations on children's word identification and processing" in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, with Dr. Holly Storkel (KU Speech-Language-Hearing). (March, 2018)