We are delighted to introduce the newest members of our academic family – the postdoctoral researchers who have recently joined our department! Their expertise and innovative approaches promise to bring fresh energy and new perspectives to our ongoing projects and research endeavors.

Austin German is an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow working under the guidance of Professor Diane Brentari. HIs research focuses on Zinacantec Family Homesign (“Z sign”), a signed language developed by three deaf siblings and their hearing extended family members in Zinacantán, a Tsotsil Maya community of highland Chiapas, Mexico. He is broadly interested in (i) the relationship between community structure and language structure, i.e. how the social dynamics of signing communities influence the grammatical structure of signed languages; and (ii) how variation in the learning environment (e.g., how many language models are available to a learner) influences an individual’s language development. HIs postdoctoral project focuses on the morphophonological and morphosyntactic structure of Z sign in comparison to other sign languages, homesign systems, and gestures of non-signing individuals. Austin received my PhD from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin in 2024. Before that, he received a BA in Linguistics and a BS in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego.

LEE Si Kai (also goes by Sky/Skai) earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Connecticut in December 2023, and prior to coming to Chicago, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. His primary research interests are in syntax and his own native dialect of Singlish, but he maintains an active secondary interest in formal semantics, particularly where it interfaces with syntax, as well as in the architecture of contact languages more generally. Outside of linguistics, he enjoy bouldering (albeit at a very low level), making cocktails, kayaking (when the weather permits), and watching YouTube videos on a wide variety of different topics — he is also always open to new experiences so if you have a recommendation with respect to something you love to do in Chicago, he’d love to hear from you. He is excited to be a part of the Linguistics Department at UChicago, and look forward to having many a fruitful discussion about the weird and wonderful linguistic phenomena that exist with everybody in the near future. Through this, he hopes to be able to further both his personal as well as our collective understanding of the intrinsic, shared human capacity for language. Fun Fact: since leaving Singapore after completing his bachelor’s degree, He has spent his time in a succession of so-called “windy” cities/towns: He was first in Storrs, CT, then in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and he has now landed in Chicago, IL, which promises to be the windiest/coldest place so far. 

Serpil Karabüklü is a postdoctoral researcher in the Sign Language Linguistics Lab, working on nonmanuals in terms of their semantic and pragmatic roles in sign languages. She collaborates with Prof. Diane Brentari on signers’ accommodation strategies in instrumental events. She presented findings from American and Turkish Sign Languages in a talk with Prof. Brentari, titled Accommodation in atypical situations: Crosslinguistic production and perception studies at the Formal and Experimental Advances in Sign Language Theory 2024 (FEAST 2024). Dr. Karabüklü also gave a poster presentation on the findings of her collaborative work on focus in Turkish Sign Language, Focus prominence in focal and non-focal domains in Turkish Sign Language (TİD). She also recently published her analysis of simultaneous modulations of manual and nonmanual domains for signer certainty, Simultaneity of certainty in Turkish Sign Language (TİD), at the Journal of Pragmatics.

Yevgeniy Melguy is excited to be joining the department this fall as a new post-doc! Yevgeniy completed his BA in linguistics at Reed College, followed by a PhD in linguistics at UC Berkeley. He recently returned to the US this summer after doing a postdoc at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, following in Melissa Baese-Berk’s footsteps. Yevgeniy’s work focuses on speech perception and production, with a particular interest in multilingualism, second-language acquisition, and accented speech. At UChicago, he will be collaborating with Melissa on a project investigating the mechanisms that listeners use to adapt to an unfamiliar accent or dialect. The research aims to understand the perceptual strategies that enable listeners to achieve rapid adaptation to an accent, and how they generalize this knowledge to new speech contexts. Outside of his scientific pursuits, Yevgeniy enjoys staying active with hobbies such as hiking, biking, rock climbing, martial arts, cooking/baking, and pottery. He looks forward to meeting everyone in person soon and encourages colleagues to say hi if they see him around the department!

Starting this fall, Xuetong Yuan will be a postdoctoral fellow working with Ming Xiang. She primarily works on semantics and pragmatics, with a secondary interest in prosody. She received her PhD from the linguistics department at University of Connecticut, and she spent her undergraduate years at Nankai University. Her current research centers on understanding how linguistic expressions restrict and organize discourse. To this end, she has worked on discourse particles, questions, focus and prosody, speech acts/clause types, and conditionals. Her dissertation explores the notion of conditionality from a cross-linguistic perspective and examines the intricate interactions of discourse and conditional constructions in languages such as Mandarin and Japanese. The project Ming and she are working on aims to explore the discourse notion of the Question Under Discussion and its potential impact on language processing. She is very excited to have the chance to work on a topic which aligns so well with her interests, and she very much look forward to collaborating with Ming. Xuetong was born in Beijing, and she currently spend more time in Tokyo with her family during breaks. She enjoys both cities. When she is not working, she enjoys music (classical and pop), baseball games, and video games. She goes to baseball games and concerts regularly when she is in Tokyo, and she looks forward to continuing my hobbies in Chicago.