Young Scholar Awards

SHSP has a long tradition of honoring young scholars for research presented at its annual meeting.

Since 2022, the Gibson/Fedorenko Young Scholar Award is presented to honor young scholars who present outstanding scientific work as a talk at the annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Each year, two scholars are selected for the award. Each of the two awardees receive $1000. Two honorable mentions are also awarded.

From 2001 to 2021, the Jerrold J. Katz Young Scholar Award was awarded for the paper or poster presented at the Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing best exemplifying the qualities of intellectual rigor, creativity and independence of thought, which characterized the life and work of Dr. Jerrold J. Katz.

Read more about the Awards

Gibson/Fedorenko Young Scholar Award (2022-)


The award selection is made by a subcommittee composed of members of the executive committee, plus Edward Gibson. Individual members of the subcommittee will not participate if they have a conflict of interest, which occurs if any of the candidates come from the same department or research group as that individual. Current students/postdocs of the award donors, or authors of talks on which the award donors are co-authors, are not eligible for the award. 


The money for this award has been generously provided by Ted Gibson, Evelina Fedorenko, and an anonymous donor. Ted Gibson and Evelina Fedorenko named this prize in honor of their parents:


Svetlana and Georgiy Fedorenko

Lila Elizabeth McPhedran and James Douglas Gibson


all of whom supported them to pursue scientific research into human language.

Gibson/Fedorenko Young Scholar Awards

2024 HSP37 at University of Michigan

Mudafia Zafar

(IIT Delhi)

The Role of Locality and Formulation Ease during Sentence Production (with Samar Husain)

Maayan Keshev

(Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

A transient binding model of interference in sentence processing (with Mandy Cartner, Aya Meltzer-Asscher, Brian Dillon)

Honorable mentions

Kate Stone (University of Potsdam): Two ERP experiments challenging existing accounts of the N400 semantic illusion (with Milena Rabovsky)



2023 HSP36 at Pitt

Grusha Prasad 

(Colgate)

Studying relative clause representations: a novel parsing model and priming paradigm (with Tal Linzen)

An infrequent, large cost underlies garden path effects: an RT distribution approach (with Brian Dillon)

Honorable mentions

Sanghee Kim (University of Chicago): Memory retrieval is sensitive to discourse status: through the lens of pronoun resolution (with Ming Xiang)


Zach Maher (UMD): They know who speak this way: knowledge of variation in listeners with different experiences of African American language (with Jan Edwards and Jared Novick)

2022 HSP35 at UCSC

Vishal Arvindam 

(UCSC)

Anti-local anaphors in Telugu are subject to local antecedent interference (with Matt Wagers)

Sarah Hye-yeon Lee 

(Penn)

Where do you think the ball is?: Using webcam-based eye-tracking to investigate mental representations of object locations in transfer-of-possession events (with Elsi Kaiser)

Honorable mentions

Eun-Kyoung Rosa Lee  (UMD): Argument roles and verb expectations: Narrowing a comprehension-production contrast (with Masato Nakamura, Hanna Muller, Colin Phillips) 

Sanghee Kim (Chicago): Memory retrieval selectively targets different discourse units (with Ming Xiang)

Sebastian Sauppe (Zurich): The Agent Bias in Comprehension is Robust in an OVS Language, at least for Human Referents: Evidence from Äiwoo (Solomon Islands) (with Åshild Næss, Giovanni Roversi, Martin Meyer, Ina Bornkessel-Schleswesky, Balthasar Bickel)

Jerrold J. Katz Young Scholar Awards

2021 CUNY34 at Penn

Rebecca Tollan (Delaware)

The dual nature of subjecthood: Unifying subject islands and that-trace effects (with Bilge Palaz)

2012-2021

2021 Rebecca Tollan

2020 Marju Kaps

2019 Tyler Knowlton

2018 Liv Hoversten

2017 Matthew Lowder

2016 Lap-Ching Keung

2015 Idan Blank

2014 Dan Parker

2013 Chigusa Kurumada

2012 Jana Häussler

2001-2011

2011 Sol Lago, Wing Yee Chow

2010 Adriana Hanulíková

2009 Adrian Staub

2008 Gunnar Jacob

2007 T. Florian Jaeger, Neal Snider

2006 Scott Jackson

2005 Sachiko Aoshima

2004 Andrew Nevins

2003 Britta Stolterfoht

2002 John Hale