Professor emeritus Mary Beckman received an honorary doctorate from Radboud University for her exceptional contributions to linguistic science, having "changed the way we look at and study speech" (Mirjam Ernestus, Radboud). The university awarded honorary doctorates to seven scholars, one for each of its faculties, in celebration of its centenary. The awards were given to scholars in the spirit of the centenary’s theme: recognizing work that has improved their respective fields and made the world a better place.
Here at Ohio State, Mary served as an active member of the department for more than thirty years until her retirement in 2016, where she served as advisor to 25 Ph.D.s and taught courses in Phonetics, Phonology and Historical Linguistics. Her contributions to the field include the ToBI system for annotating prosodic features and the Paidologos database of infant speech production. Her other work is wide-ranging, covering various aspects of intonation, bilingual and multilingual phonology, Asian languages and even chimpanzee vocalizations. We join Radboud University in congratulating Mary on this well-deserved honor.
Graduate student Jingyi Chen and associate professor Micha Elsner won an Area Chair award in the area of Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics at the meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics for their paper “Exploring How Generative Adversarial Networks Learn Phonological Representations”!
Graduate student Ariana Steele was awarded a Global Arts & Humanities Discovery Theme Graduate Team Fellowship in the annual discovery theme ‘Abolition and Freedom Dreams’
The Department of Linguistics’ Computational Cognitive Modeling Lab was awarded a three-year National Science Foundation standard grant entitled “CompCog: RI: Small: Human-like semantic grammar induction through knowledge distillation from pre-trained language models” (PI: William Schuler).
Graduate student Clayton Marr won the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies 2023 Beth Holmgren Graduate Student Essay Prize for an outstanding essay by a graduate student in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. His essay was entitled "The Angevin-Albanian Element in The Albanian Lexicon".
Graduate student Lindon Dedvukaj received a Student Travel Award to go towards expenses incurred while attending NWAV51 in New York.
Graduate student Martha Johnson was awarded an Alumni Grant for Graduate Research and Scholarship (AGGRS) by the Graduate School. The grant will fund part of her dissertation fieldwork in Tanzania. She was also awarded an OSU Arts & Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant, which will defray costs of a two-month visit to Prof. Hannah Gibson’s lab at the University of Essex (UK) in summer 2024.
Alum Xiaofei Lu (PhD ’06) was ranked among the world’s top 2% most-cited scientists in the Language & Linguistics subfield in the October 2023 data-update for “Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators” published by Stanford University. His latest book, Corpus linguistics and second language acquisition: Perspectives, issues, and findings, was published by Routledge in 2023.
