Keynote Speakers
Kristine Yu is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is also currently the Undergraduate Program Director in Linguistics. She received a B.S. in Chemistry from Stanford University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California Los Angeles. She didn't know what linguistics was or that it even existed until she took LING 1 in her penultimate quarter at Stanford! Her research focuses on tone and intonation, from the speech signal on up to grammar and human language processing. It integrates fieldwork, experiments, and computational approaches. Some of her particular language interests include Austronesian languages (especially Polynesian and Formosan languages) and African American English. She currently holds an NSF grant on African American English prosodic variation, together with her UMass colleagues Lisa Green, Brendan O'Connor, and Meghan Armstrong-Abrami. Outside of linguistics, Yu's interests include all kinds of music (she plays violin and piano) and physical activities like rowing on the Connecticut River and Crossfit. She is also an animal lover and has a wonderful cat named Kizzy.
Marten van Schijndel is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Cornell University, specializing in computational psycholinguistics. He is especially interested in incremental language processing. Which language predictions are warranted in different contexts and which predictions do humans make in those contexts? How do humans alter their language processing in response to uncertainty, and what can computational models tell us about human language processing? Marten's work involves building different computational language processing models to determine the most effective language processing strategies in different contexts and comparing those models against psycholinguistic measurements of human language processing (such as reading times) to determine which model components may be present in human language processing.
