SFU Linguistics student Rebekah Wong receives kudos from members of the Linguistics community for her work on the effect of bilingualism for the perception of Quantifier raising phenomena for Japanese.

Rebekah's paper, “The Perception of Quantifier Raising in Japanese-English Bilinguals” received 2nd place for SFU’s 2021 Student Learning Commons Writing Contest for the Middle Years category.

After this great result, Rebekah was also able to present this paper at the 2022 Language Sciences Undergraduate Research Conference (LSURC).  At the conference which took place at UBC in February, Rebekah’s presentation was voted 3rd best presentation.  

These accolades are a great start to Rebekah’s experience as a beginning researcher in Linguistics and a clear indicator of her interest and passion. The 2022 LSURC was her very first research conference presentation, and her award-winning paper was the first linguistics paper she had ever written.  

For Rebekah, writing “The Perception of Quantifier Raising in Japanese-English Bilinguals” was a joy: “I really enjoyed writing it because the topic combined semantics and syntax—my favourite linguistic disciplines—with Japanese, my favourite foreign language to study”.  

As a result of attending the LSURC, Rebekah had the chance to listen to the research of other undergraduate Linguistics students, and also get feedback on her own work. “The feedback I received was always very constructive and helped me improve both the clarity of my writing as well as the strength of my analysis”.

Rebekah also had the opportunity to converse with Linguist Lisa Matthewson, who was cited in Rebekah’s paper! “it was a shocking experience to virtually meet someone I had cited in my references list—it’s a small world!”  

Currently, Rebekah’s main interest lies in semantics, and she hopes to complete a joint major in Computing Science and Linguistics. She’s excited to “learn more about applying computational methods in studying natural languages”.  

The department of Linguistics at SFU congratulates Rebekah for her excellent work. We are excited to hear more about Rebeka Wong’s future work in linguistics!