Celebrating students’ linguistic research across the semester.
by Fabiola M. Martinez Del Valle
This spring, students and faculty from UW–Madison’s English Language and Linguistics program presented their research at three major venues: the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL), the Workshop in General Linguistics (WiGL 20), and the Fifth International Conference on Heritage/Community Languages. Their work reflects the program’s strengths in bilingualism, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and second language acquisition.
AAAL 2026 Conference
The 2026 AAAL conference took place March 21–24 at the Sheraton Grand Chicago Riverwalk in Chicago, Illinois, with a virtual session on April 24. Centered on the theme “Reimagining Disciplinary Practices,” the conference brought together scholars exploring how applied linguistics can respond to global challenges while expanding disciplinary boundaries.
Graduate Presenters
- Fabiola M. Martínez Del Valle presented Cross-disciplinary linguistic variation in academic abstracts, a corpus-based study comparing voice, verb semantics, and agency strategies across major academic fields to show how disciplinary identity shapes rhetorical choices.
- Joseph Moran presented Assessing the effects of syntactic ambiguity in pragmatic processing, investigating whether structural ambiguity influences reaction-time patterns in scalar implicature processing among L1 and L2 English speakers.
- Piyaboot “Seer” Sumonsriworakun presented The Influence of English on Naming, Code-Mixing, and Code-Switching in Thai Mass Media, offering updated evidence on how English shapes naming practices across Thai media platforms.
- Vatcharit “Pond” Chantajinda presented Multilingual versus bilingual learners: Crosslinguistic influence in the acquisition of L2-English causative psych verbs, examining how knowledge of Spanish influences Thai learners’ acquisition of English causative psych verbs.
- Mariam Titilope Balogun presented Shifting Modality in American English, a diachronic corpus study tracing changes in the use of must and have to across spoken and news registers.
Faculty Presenter
- Professor Jacee Cho, with collaborators Hakyung Jung and Lidia Gault, presented L2 acquisition of Russian directed motion constructions, comparing how L1-Korean and L1-English speakers acquire Russian motion-verb patterns and how L1-specific constraints shape L2 outcomes.
Lab Presenters
- Second Language Acquisition Laboratory (SLAB)
Lab members Jill McLeod, Meng-Han Sandy Shao, Ryan Shin, Zach Peterson, Aruzhan Dauletkhan, Vatcharit “Pond” Chantajinda, Fabiola Martinez Del Valle, Joseph Moran, Kevin de Armas, Mariam Titilope Balogun, Yongjia Deng, and Zimo Kong, along with lab director Professor Jacee Cho, presented L2 acquisition of (un-)bounded adjectival scales; approximate replication of Starr & Destruel (2024). This collaborative project examines whether L2 learners incorporate semantic boundedness when computing scalar inferences and introduces a novel adjective-scaling task to probe learners’ sensitivity to gradability. - English Language and Linguistics Psycholinguistics Laboratory (ELLPL)
Lab member Yang Liu, along with lab director Professor Juliet Huynh, presented Processing L1 and L2 Chinese compound words: Evidence from masked priming. Their study uses masked priming to compare how native and non-native speakers process transparent and opaque Chinese compounds, offering insights into morphological decomposition during early visual word recognition.
WiGL 20
The 20th Annual Workshop in General Linguistics (WiGL), held March 12–14, 2026 at UW–Madison, brought together student researchers for presentations spanning phonetics, morphology, bilingualism, and computational linguistics.
Graduate Presenters
- Fabiola M. Martínez Del Valle presented Morphological Processing of Hybrid Forms in Puerto Rican Spanish–English Bilinguals, exploring how bilinguals process English-stem/Spanish-morphology hybrids under masked priming.
- Mariam Balogun presented Cross-linguistic studies of Yoruba L1 production of English word-initial stops, analyzing how Yoruba speakers acquire English voicing contrasts and where L1 timing influences remain.
- Rabia Pérez Gonzalez presented Morphological processing of inflected Spanish verbs in heritage bilinguals, comparing English-dominant and Spanish-dominant heritage speakers’ decomposition patterns in Spanish verb morphology.
- Piyaboot “Seer” Sumonsriworakun presented The Influence of English on Naming in Thai Mass Media, offering a refined categorization of naming practices and code/script mixing in Thai media.
Undergraduate Presenters
- Meng-Han Sandy Shao, Jill McLeod (MA student), and Ryan Shin presented A new approach to assessing the deriving and scaling of adjectival scalar implicatures, introducing a novel method to test how L2 English learners position gradable adjectives on semantic scales.
Lab Presenters
- English Language and Linguistics Psycholinguistics Laboratory (ELLPL)
Lab members Kuangzi Li, Song Zhou, Kevin J. de Armas Buchhorsts, and lab director Professor Juliet Huynh, along with collaborator Kristen Fleckenstein (Associate Professor of Linguistics, Coastal Carolina University), presented Towards Transformer-Based A-maze Distractor Generation. This project evaluates the challenges of using transformer models to generate controlled syntactic violations for A-maze tasks. The team highlights mismatches between model training goals and the constraints required for psycholinguistic experimentation.
Fifth International Conference on Heritage/Community Languages
Held February 27–28, 2026, at UCLA, this quadrennial conference brings together researchers studying heritage language acquisition, pedagogy, and policy.
Graduate Presenter
- Rabia Pérez Gonzalez presented Morphological processing of inflected Spanish verbs in heritage bilinguals, a pilot study comparing how English-dominant and Spanish-dominant heritage speakers process Spanish inflectional morphology during visual word recognition.
Lab Presenters
- English Language and Linguistics Psycholinguistics Laboratory (ELLPL)
Lab members Zach Peterson, Song Zhou, and Marie-Thérèse Jasperson, along with lab director Professor Juliet Huynh, presented Homophone Priming in L1 Hmong and L2 English: Evidence from Eye-Tracking. This project investigates how orthographic and phonological information are processed during real‑time word recognition and whether conceptual cues modulate priming effects across bilingual profiles.
Across three major conferences, UW–Madison’s English Language and Linguistics community demonstrated exceptional scholarly range—from psycholinguistic experimentation to corpus-based analysis and bilingual processing. Their contributions reflect the program’s commitment to rigorous, innovative research and to preparing emerging scholars for impactful academic careers.