FYIs

The Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York is pleased to announce the selection of eight Fellows who will join us for this year’s Senior International Fellows Program. The Fellows come from Brazil, Italy, Ghana, Kosovo, Mexico, Senegal, and Ukraine and will attend seminars together in New York throughout the month of October. 

Read about the Fellows, their research topics, and their professional development in the field of philanthropy. 

Learn more about the Senior International Fellows Program.

Congratulations to Psychology Ph.D. student Shivani Shah (Industrial/Organizational Psychology training area) on being selected as a finalist for the DEIA Excellence in Research Grant.

Professor Josh Cohen, along with Foad Torshizi and Vazira Zamindar, co-edited Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn — a special issue of ARTMargins . See it here. 

Olivia Mignone (Ph.D. student) will present her research “The Place of Himalayan Languages in the Linguistic Landscape of Jackson Heights” at the 14th Linguistic Landscape Workshop: Utopías and Dystopías at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Sept. 7^th, 2023.

Read the news story for a breakdown of how funding for doctoral students works at the Graduate Center.

Prof. Irina Sekerina (and Natalia Meir, David Anaki, Bar-Ilan University, Israel) received a BSF-NSF (United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation) grant for the project entitled "Language processing in bilingual children in L1 and L2: Prediction and integration of morphosyntactic information" 2023-2027 ($193,600.00).

SUMMARY: The proposed project will chart new territories in child bilingual language processing by conducting a set of three innovative experiments aiming to investigate mechanisms of prediction and integration of morphosyntactic information in bilingual children. We will test whether and how processes of prediction and integration of morphosyntactic information are different in bilingual children as compared to their monolingual peers. Possible L1-L2 interaction will be addressed within the Unified Competition Model (MacWhinney, 2008, 2012). We will also test whether prediction and integration during spoken sentence comprehension rely on production as per the Prediction-by-Production Account (Pickering & Gambi, 2018) or alternatively, whether bilinguals show a production-comprehension asymmetry (Grimm et al., 2011; Prévost & White, 2000).

Also

Prof. Sekerina will give a keynote talk at the RUEG Conference 2023 - Linguistic Variability in Heritage Language Research (26-28 Sept. 2023) in Berlin: https://www.linguistik.hu-berlin.de/en/institut-en/professuren-en/rueg/networking-1/rueg-conference-2021/rueg-conferene-2023-linguistic-variability-in-heritage-language-research. The title of her keynote talk is "How corpus and experimental studies of heritage languages can inform each other."

ABSTRACT: Knowledge about heritage language (HL) grammars is dependent on a large amount of (psycho)linguistic resources of three types (Keuleers & Morielli, 2020): (1) corpora that contain objective data about properties of HLs, (2) behavioral experiments that rely on design and stimuli provided by researchers; and (3) abstract concepts, such theories, formalisms, and algorithms. In this talk, I will describe methodological advances in how these resources form a dynamic system in the field of HL bilingualism. I will illustrate (1) with our new Brazilian Portuguese-Russian corpus (BraPoRus, Sekerina et al., 2023) of elderly bilingual heritage Russian speakers living in Brazil and compare it to RUEG (Emerging Grammars in Language Contact Situations), and (2) with the eye-tracking experiments in the Visual World Paradigm that can be conducted with heritage speakers in-person and online (eye-tracking without an eye tracker, Özsoy et al., 2023). I will conclude that both types of resources are suitable and necessary to study heritage speakers’ grammars.

Simon Zuberek (CL M.A. student) will be leading a workshop titled “A Calculator for Writing: Harnessing Generative AI to Develop Instructional Content for Foreign Language Writing” at the VI Consortium Workshop for Language Teaching and Learning (CLTL) at Princeton University, Oct. 6-7, 2023.

Prof. Kyle Gorman (et al) received a $150,000 start-up grant from the US – Israel Binational Science Foundation for a project titled “Diacritization for the World's Scripts”

The August 2023 Newsletter for the Computer Science / Data Science programs can be found here.

The May 2023 Newsletter for the Computer Science / Data Science program can be found here.