Four graduate students join PhD Program
The Department of Linguistics proudly welcomes four new graduate students into the PhD Program this fall. They were officially inducted into the University community by President Peter Salovey of Yale University and Dean Lynn Cooley of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the Matriculation Ceremony in late August. Our new students have interests in phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and historical linguistics. Their unique backgrounds have already begun to enrich our Department as they engage with their new colleagues in coursework, reading, and research.
Caitlyn Antal joins us from Concordia University, where she earned her bachelor’s degree from the Honours in Psychology program. As an undergraduate, Caitlyn studied language from a psychological perspective, working on topics ranging from the comprehension of aspectual verbs in so-called coerced sentences in individuals with aphasia to investigating the interface between semantic and pragmatic processes with eye-tracking measures. Caitlyn’s thesis studies the representation of verb concepts in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease. In her graduate studies, Caitlyn hopes to continue working on understanding representations of conceptual meaning through cognitive approaches.
Marisha Evans graduated last year from Macalester College with a BA in Linguistics and Music. Her honors thesis research focused on variation in vowel length and voice onset time in oronyms—pairs of phrases such as atop and a top or attack and a tack that have the same sounds but differ in the locations of word boundaries. During her time at Yale, Marisha hopes to study historical phonology and language contact.
Randi Martinez has spent the past academic year here at Yale studying non-standard constructions in North American English as part of a post-baccalaureate program. She is staying on in order to earn her PhD.
Jared Sharp earned his BA in Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). There, he worked as a research assistant on various graduate-student and faculty projects, working with languages such as Tlahuapa Mixtec. Jared originally focused on documentation and archiving, but after working with the language data he became interested in phonetics and phonology. Jared had the opportunity to learn to use UCSB’s brand new electromagnetic articulography equipment. He hopes to apply those skills here at Yale by working with researchers in the Department of Linguistics and Haskins Laboratories on projects that integrate experimental and computational approaches to phonetics.
Our Department is very excited to have Caitlyn, Marisha, Randi, and Jared with us, and we look forward to working with them in the years to come!