Recent news
Welcome to the Summer 2024 labbies!
Welcome to the four new students who will be joining the lab this summer:
- Serena Agarwal (Brown U. '27) is a second-year undergraduate student at Brown University. She is interested in the intersection of Linguistics, Computer Science, and Neuroscience, and she is particularly interested in language acquisition, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics.
- Maryam Elbenni (Yale U. '26) is a rising third-year undergraduate at Yale University majoring in Cognitive Science, with a focus in linguistics. Her research interests include multilingual speech, L2 language acquisition, and natural language processing.
- Jaiden (Mengan) Li (Andover High School '25) is a high school junior. She is interested in second language acquisition, East Asian languages (including lesser-known dialects like Hmong and Fukienese), and natural language processing.
- Nick Tanner (UPenn '26) is a third-year student studying Linguistics and Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. He's interested in the linguistics of American Sign Language and multilingualism.
And a warm welcome back to Jupitara, Felix, and Sara!
Kpogo at ACAL, ASA
Felix Kpogo was busy this month giving presentations at the 55th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 55) in Montreal and at the 186th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Ottawa (joint with Acoustics Week in Canada). His ACAL talk was entitled "Locality effects in [æ] vowel production in Twi", and his ASA poster was entitled "Harmony in transition: Exploring the perception-production relationship in sound change".
Kpogo defends
Congratulations to Felix Kpogo on the successful defense of his PhD dissertation, "Investigating sound change in Twi vowel harmony: A sociophonetic study of age, gender, and locality effects"!
Chang at MoS
Prof. Chang is one of the guest scientists speaking at this weekend's AAPI Month celebration at Boston's Museum of Science:
https://mos.org/events/asian-american-pacific-islander-heritage-month
Chang at MARCS, Macquarie
Last week, Prof. Chang gave talks at The MARCS Institute and at Macquarie University's Center for Language Sciences. The titles of his talks were "Understanding bilingual speech control: Insights from intoxication" and "Examining language knowledge through the multilingual repertoire".
Awards for Kellogg, Kpogo, Ray
Congratulations to PhD students Jackson Kellogg, Felix Kpogo, and Jupitara Ray on their recent awards and fellowships!
- Jackson received a 2024-25 Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship to support his study of Amharic.
- Felix received a 2024 Graduate Student Award from the BU Center for the Humanities.
- Jupitara received a Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship (GRAF) from the BU Graduate School of Arts & Sciences to support her summer dissertation research.
Kudos to all!
Kpogo to Brown
We're thrilled to announce that our own Felix Kpogo has accepted a two-year Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University, where he will be based in the Linguistics Program. Congratulations, Felix! We're so proud!
Chang at Lund U.
This week, Prof. Chang will be giving a talk in Lund University's Centre for Languages and Literature seminar series on March 15. The title of his talk is "Knowledge of language(s) in multilingual contexts".
Chang & Yao in CUP volume
A paper entitled "An individual-differences perspective on variation in heritage Mandarin speakers" (Chang & Yao, 2024) has been published by Cambridge University Press in the book The Phonetics and Phonology of Heritage Languages (edited by Rajiv Rao).
Abstract: This chapter takes an individual-differences perspective on the dual sound systems of American heritage speakers (HSs) of Mandarin Chinese. Based on detailed sociodemographic data and production data on segmentals and suprasegmentals, we build holistic demographic and phonetic profiles for HSs, as well as native speakers and late learners, to explore how different aspects of their two languages (Mandarin, English) may develop in relation to each other and how individual variation in production may be related to socio-demographic factors. Using multiple factor analysis (MFA), we describe the range of these profiles, identify clusters of variation defined by different sociodemographic factors, and argue that some factors (e.g., age of arrival, language(s) spoken at home) have more predictive power for phonetic profiles than others. Overall, our results suggest a significant, if limited, link between socio-demographic factors and production, but only in Mandarin. We conclude by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of group-based and individual-centered approaches.
This study followed Open Science practices, and all materials, data, visualizations, and code are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/u4w2g/.
Congrats to UROP recipient Maddie Jin
Congratulations to sophomore Linguistics minor Madelyn (Maddie) Jin, who was awarded an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) grant to work on linguistics research in Spring 2024! Below is a brief description of the project she will be working on:
- Maddie Jin: “The impact of speech rhythm in the production and perception of Asian-ness in American English”
In Spring 2024, Maddie will conduct an acoustic study of Asian Americans' interview speech in English to examine aspects of their speech rhythm and the degree to which there are differences with respect to English speakers of other ethnoracial backgrounds.