Department of Linguistics and Languages at McMaster University

04/01/2026

We are pleased to invite students, alumni, faculty, and friends of the Department of Linguistics and Languages to the 2026 Student Research Day on April 8, 2026, 9:00am-4:00pm in Chester New Hall 104.

This year’s Student Research Day will feature presentations and posters that reflect the wide range of research being done in the Department of Linguistics and Languages by undergraduate and graduate students, and a keynote talk by Büşra Marşan and Jasper Jian, PhD candidates at Stanford University, titled “Turkish comitative (non-)coordination: A new view on hierarchy effects.”

View the full program and abstract book:https://readlab.humanities.mcmaster.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Student-Research-Day-2026-Program.pdf

We hope you will join us for what promises to be an engaging day celebrating language research!

03/27/2026

The Cognitive Science of Language lecture series talk will take place on Tuesday April 7, 12:30-2:20pm, LRW 2001. The lecture will be delivered by Dr. Freda Shi. Dr. Shi is an Assistant Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and a Faculty Member at the Vector Institute, where she also holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science with distinction from the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, and was a visiting doctoral student in Brain & Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in computational linguistics and natural language processing. Her work has been recognized by an Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP 2025, nominations for the Best Paper Award at ACL 2019, 2021, and 2024, and, earlier, a Google PhD Fellowship and a Finalist Award for the Facebook Fellowship. Her research has been supported by Autodesk, CIFAR, MITACS, NSERC, OpenAI, and TD-Layer 6 Lab.

Title: The "Developmental Linguistics" in Language Models

Abstract: With the advancements of powerful large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, there is an increasing interest in understanding how these models gradually acquire different linguistic skills throughout the learning process---a field we may call "computational developmental linguistics" with computational language models as the subjects. The anticipated impact of this line of research is twofold: first, it helps characterize the learning process of language models to inform the enhancements; second, findings in this area may lead to novel hypotheses regarding human language acquisition.
In this talk, I will first review current methodologies for studying developmental linguistics in language models. I will then present a case study from our group investigating how vision-language models acquire the skill of symbol grounding---the process of linking a linguistic form to its visual ground.

We are looking forward to seeing you!

01/13/2026

The Cognitive Science of Language lecture series talk will take place on Tuesday January 20, 12:30-2:20pm, LRW 2001. The lecture will be delivered by Dr. Sara A. Hart. Dr. Hart is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Developmental Science and Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Broadly, her substantive research relates to understanding how and why people differ in their cognitive development, particularly focused on reading and math development. Most of her work to date has focused on using twin and genomic methods to understand the "nature" and "nurture" of child development. She examines the role of an individual’s genetic variants and contexts in predicting school achievement and intervention response. She also contributes to the field of meta-science, understanding how scientists do science, with a particular interest in supporting rigorous and reproducible developmental science. With colleagues, she built a data repository, LDbase, to support the data sharing and data access needs of scientists working in fields of developmental science related to education. Beyond research, she is passionate about training, translation of research, and advocating for equity deserving groups in science.

01/06/2026

Polish is apparently the optimal language for AI applications and a very interesting language for a linguist to know. Here is your chance to learn it!

12/06/2025

We are very sad to inform you about the passing of our retired colleague and professor of German, Gerry Chapple. Our former students may remember Gerry's wit and enthusiasm. He will be missed by all who knew him. The following information is taken from the funeral home website at https://www.burnett-white.com/obituaries/Clement-Gerald-Chapple?obId=46288942

Gerald was born in 1937 in Canada. In Hamilton, Ontario, Gerald graduated from McMaster University in 1960 with a BA in German and French. Inspired by working at the Canadian Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair and by studying at the University of Munich, Gerald went on to earn his PhD in German Literature from Harvard University.

Over his 36 years as a professor at McMaster University, Gerald shared with students and colleagues his lifelong enthusiasm for language, literature, philosophy, and culture, focusing on German while drawing on his knowledge of French, Italian, Ancient Greek, and Latin. A prolific translator of German prose and poetry into English, he just last month finished his tenth crime novel by Swiss-Canadian author Bernadette Calonego.

Jerry’s interests ranged widely: birds counted daily for Cornell Ornithology, plants and trees always known by Latin names, butterflies and insects photographed in detail, classical music instantly recognized by composer and title, Dave Brubeck, opera, Kandinsky, Tom Lehrer, Monty Python, authors from Elizabeth Bowen to Bertolt Brecht, long-form jokes, and his beloved Blue Jays, Montréal Canadiens, and Buffalo Bills.

View Gerald Chapple's obituary, contribute to their memorial, see their funeral service details, and more.