We welcome 7 new PhD students this Fall! They are Marcia Gonzales, Jessie He, Joohee Ko, Chunan Li, Jordyn Martin, Uduma Umeh, and Summer Xia.

Joohee Ko received her M.A. in Linguistics from Seoul National University and her B.A. from Ewha Womans University, where she majored in English Education and minored in Psychology. Her research interests are in phonetics, phonology, and psycholinguistics. She has been working on cue integration in Korean, and she is interested in further exploring cue weighting and individual differences in speech perception and production. In addition to linguistics, she enjoys rock climbing and drawing.

Chunan Li is a recent MSc graduate from the Language Evolution and Cognition program at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focused on the relative order of gender and number morphology, using experimental methods to explore how cognitive biases and linguistic input shape languages. She also investigated morphosyntactic theory through the lens of diachronic changes and dialectal variations in Chinese. Broadly curious about the mechanisms of language change, she draws insights from historical linguistics, cognitive science, and evolutionary theory. After all, change is inevitable, but it can be enjoyable.

Uduma Umeh is a first year PhD student in linguistics. He is interested in experimental syntax and its interfaces with morphology and semantics. He has already researched on the cross-linguistic variations of various kinds of ellipsis in English and Igbo (his native language) through the Minimalist lens of Jason Merchant’s E-Feature/E-Givenness theory of ellipsis licensing. His future inquiry, amongst others, will include an investigation into the availability of different ellipsis kinds across the Niger-Congo group of languages. he holds a B.A. (English/Literature) and an MA (English Language) from Abia State University, Uturu, Nigeria and the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria respectively. He enjoys solitude and meditation and intellectually stimulating conversations. His goal is to be in the academia to teach and inspire. 

Summer Xia earned her MSc degree in Language Sciences (Neuroscience, Language & Communication) from University College London. Her research focuses on psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, particularly how prediction mechanisms and memory retrieval interact to shape online sentence processing. Outside her studies, she enjoys playing the piano, sketching, creating watercolor art (especially children’s illustrations), and watching panda videos. If she were not a linguistics student, she’d love to be a panda caretaker.