News
Congratulations to Isabel Deibel, who has recently accepted a position with Duolingo as a Polyglot/Linguist/Curriculum Designer. Best of luck Isabel!
The Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese announces a new education abroad opportunity starting this summer in Ronda, Spain. For more information, visit the program website: http://sites.psu.edu/ronda/
Congratulations to Priscila López-Beltrán Forcada, on receiving a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Linguistics Program (2/2020-1/2022)! The title and abstract can be found below:
Title: Heritage speakers processing of the Spanish subjunctive during online comprehension: A pupillometric study.
Summary: Within heritage language research, the Spanish subjunctive mood is perhaps the most studied construction. The vast majority of studies have concluded that heritage speakers’ knowledge of the Spanish subjunctive is subject to incomplete acquisition, language loss or simplification. Recently, however, several sociolinguistic studies have challenged deficit-oriented perspectives, providing evidence that, while different from that of monolingual native speakers, heritage speakers’ linguistic knowledge is by no means deficient. Given this disconnect between previous research and recent sociolinguistic findings, the proposed project employs a usage-based approach to integrate sociolinguistic data into the design of two psycholinguistic experiments that will examine heritage speakers’ processing of the subjunctive during online comprehension in long-standing bilingual communities in Albuquerque (NM), where Spanish is not in flux but, rather, maintained across generations. Two questions will be addressed: (1) To what degree are heritage speakers who live in a long-standing bilingual community sensitive to the linguistic factors (lexical and structural) constraining mood selection in Spanish? Experiment 1 will investigate lexical factors and Experiment 2 will examine structural factors, and (2) To what degree do social factors modulate heritage speakers’ sensitivity to mood selection? This question will be addressed by including sociolinguistic data obtained through a sociolinguistic interview and a language background questionnaire in generalized additive mixed-effects models.
Please join Pan-APA for its 4th annual conference whose theme is "African Innovation: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow," which will take place March 28, 2020 at Penn State. Please see the attached document for more information about presenting at and attending the conference, and feel free to circulate it to those who may be interested. This is a great opportunity to present your research to a wide and diverse audience. For more information on how to apply, please visit the Penn State Pan-African Professional Alliance website.
The department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese would like to congratulate the students of IT 470 (Italian Ghost Storytelling) who participated in the Penn State University Libraries Short Stories' "Brunchin' Around" in the fall of 2019. To read more about their achievements, check out the Penn State News article.
The Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese is pleased to announce the sixth annual Penn State Undergraduate Exhibition in Hispanic and General Linguistics (PSUxLing) to be held on Friday, April 3rd 2020. PSUxLing is an annual conference that is dedicated to promoting excellence in undergraduate research in linguistics. The first PSUxLing took place on October 6th, 2014, and was attended by over 100 faculty, graduate, and undergraduate linguists. The conference website can be found here: https://www.psuxling.com.
We invite undergraduate students to submit up to one single-authored and one jointly-authored abstract for consideration. Abstracts should be between 350 and 500 words long, not including references, and should be submitted using the Abstract Submission. The submission deadline is February 1, 2020.
During PSUxLing, undergraduate linguists have the opportunity to present their research at a two-hour poster session, as well as attend two keynote talks by leading researchers in our field. The 2020 keynote speakers are Dr. Gillian Lord (University of Florida) and Dr. Esther Brown (University of Colorado). More information about our speakers, as well as abstracts for their presentations, is available on the PSUxLing6 Website.
PSUxLing is an excellent opportunity for undergraduate linguists from across the country to meet other linguists, share ! their own research, and gain further knowledge of the field of! linguist! ics. While only current undergraduate students are eligible to present their work, everyone is welcome to attend! Travel awards of $300 to $800 will be awarded to students whose abstracts score the highest during the review process and who are traveling from outside Penn State.
The department is thrilled to announce that Sherry Roush, Professor of Italian, has been named a recipient of two prestigious grants--one from the National Endowment for the Arts in LiteraryTranslation and another one from the National Endowment for the Humanities-- to complete the first-ever English translation of Caviceo's Peregrino. A news item in Penn State Today will appear in the next few weeks.
Heather Rutten, a staff assistant in the Undergraduate Student Services area, has been notified that she is the recipient of the College of the Liberal Arts Rising Star Award.
This award recognizes staff members who have been with the College less than 2 years but who already demonstrate passion and quality in their work as well as exemplifying professionalism and dedication to the mission of their work area and the College.
We are so happy and proud that her outstanding abilities are being recognized! Heather will be receiving her award at the College of the Liberal Arts Staff Awards Reception on Tuesday, February 18th, 2020.