McLing is pleased to welcome the new incoming group of MA and PhD students!

Alex Cucinelli is finishing his M.A. thesis in Linguistics at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he studied phonological acquisition, focusing on the role phonotactics and distributional evidence play in development. He is also interested in corpus building and curation. In his spare time, Alex enjoys hiking, and exploring the world around him. He also enjoys playing and listening to music of (almost) any genre.

Emily Goodwin is interested in computational linguistics, semantic parsing, compositionality, and learnability theory. She has completed work on systematicity in neural network generalization, and did her B.A. in linguistics at McGill.

Shao-ren Lyu’s main interests lie in phonetics, sociolinguistics, and sound change in tonal languages, especially in Hakka, and Southern Min. Shao-ren received his B.A. in foreign languages and literatures and M.A. in linguistics at National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Outside of linguistics, he is fascinated by Hong Kong movies, Cantonese pop music, and gourmet food in Hong Kong. He is learning Cantonese, which is known for the complicated lexical tones.

Tarynne Pachano is a member of the Cree Nation of Chisasibi, Quebec. She spent the first five years of her life within her community before moving down south. Her first language was East Cree and she later learned English and French in elementary school in Ottawa, Ontario.  Her academic interests lie in the revitalization of Indigenous languages including her own. Along with being a student, Tarynne is also a wife and a mother to a very independent, strong-willed 21-month old little girl named Sophie.

Jonathan Palucci is interested in semantics, syntax (and the syntax-semantics interface), pragmatics and modelling natural language using mathematical structures and tools. He completed his B.A & Sc in Cognitive Science, minoring in Linguistics, at McGill University.

Connie Ting completed her B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics at the University of Toronto. Her main interests lie in phonetic variation, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition.

Beini Wang is from Ningbo, China. She is currently interested in phonetics, phonology and prosody. Her research has focused primarily on Mandarin. She completed her B.A. in linguistics, minoring in psychology and French, at McGill University. In her spare time, she enjoys playing the violin, which she started to learn only four years ago.

Wei Zhang is interested in exploring the nature of speech prosody, phonetic variation, and speech perception, as well as the application of the technologies for analyzing and modeling speech signals. She obtained her M.E. degree from the Beijing Language and Culture University.