Recent news
Chang at UiO
Prof. Chang will be in Norway next week to give a colloquium at the University of Oslo's Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan. The title of his talk is "Similarity and order effects in multilingual speech perception and production".
Chang & Ahn at PLM2022
Prof. Chang is giving a talk this week at the 51st Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM2022)! His talk (co-authored with Prof. Sunyoung Ahn, University of Manitoba) is entitled "Societal context and the development of emotion words in bilingual children" and is in the thematic session "Multilingual ecologies in a comparative perspective: Well-being of speakers, social practices and challenges to linguistic diversity" on Saturday, September 10.
Kellogg, Chang at PsyNom22
Congratulations to PhD student Jackson Kellogg and Prof. Chang on their acceptance to the upcoming Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (PsyNom22), to take place in Boston this November!
Jackson will give a talk entitled "Exploring the onset of phonetic drift in perception" (co-authored with Prof. Chang) on Friday morning in Session 13: Speech Perception I (10am-12pm).
Kpogo, Kellogg at BUCLD47
Congratulations to PhD students Felix Kpogo and Jackson Kellogg on their acceptances to the upcoming BUCLD (BUCLD 47), to take place this November!
Felix will co-present the poster "Minimizing complexity while maintaining the grammar: The case of diminutives in heritage Twi" (co-authored with Prof. Chang) with fellow PhD student Alex Kohut in the Friday afternoon poster session.
Jackson will co-present the poster "Language-specific infant babbling patterns in Kabyle Berber" with fellow PhD students Dalila Gaoua and Jupitara Ray, also in the Friday afternoon poster session.
NSF DDRI for Kpogo & Chang
Congratulations to Felix Kpogo on receiving a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement (DDRI) Grant! His dissertation project, advised by Prof. Chang, is entitled "Investigating Sound Change in an Understudied Language: A Sociophonetic Study of Age and Locality Effects". Well-done, Felix!
Paper in JASA-EL
A paper entitled "Intoxication and pitch control in tonal and non-tonal language speakers" (Tang, Chang, Green, Bao, Hindley, Kim, & Nevins, 2022) has been published in the open-access journal JASA Express Letters.
Abstract: Alcohol intoxication is known to affect pitch variability in non-tonal languages. In this study, intoxication's effects on pitch were examined in tonal and non-tonal language speakers, in both their native language (L1; German, Korean, Mandarin) and nonnative language (L2; English). Intoxication significantly increased pitch variability in the German group (in L1 and L2), but not in the Korean or Mandarin groups (in L1 or L2), although there were individual differences. These results support the view that pitch control is related to the functional load of pitch and is an aspect of speech production that can be advantageously transferred across languages, overriding the expected effects of alcohol.
This study followed Open Science practices, and all materials and data are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/2tx4m/.
BUCH Fellowships for Chang & Lindsey
Congratulations to Profs. Chang and Lindsey on receiving fellowships from the BU Center for the Humanities for 2022-2023! Prof. Chang was awarded a Jeffrey Henderson Senior Research Fellowship, and Prof. Lindsey was awarded a Junior Faculty Fellowship.
Welcome to the Summer 2022 labbies!
Welcome to the eleven students who will be joining the lab this summer:
- Adi Briskin is a rising sophomore at Washington University in St. Louis double-majoring in English and Linguistics. Her interests are in language acquisition.
- Eliana Mugar (CAS ’23) is a rising senior majoring in Linguistics and Computer Science. Her interests are in computational linguistics, multilingualism, language acquisition, phonetics/phonology, and sociolinguistics.
- Elise Gelblicht (CGS '24) is a rising junior majoring in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences. Her interests are in multilingualism, language acquisition, phonetics, and Korean.
- Erik Duchnowski is a rising junior at Boston University Academy. He is interested in phonetics, bilingualism, Polish, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Hebrew, and Latin.
- Jiaqi (Jenny) Geng is a recent graduate of the University of California at Davis, where she majored in Psychology. Her interests are in bilingualism, language acquisition, language production, and sociocultural factors.
- Marissa Carl is a rising senior at Mount Holyoke College double-majoring in Psychology and Spanish. Her interests are in bilingualism and multilingualism, second language acquisition, phonology, the relationship between phonetics and multilingualism at different stages of development, Spanish, Dutch, and Chinese.
- Peyton Krinsky is a rising junior at Tufts University majoring in Cognitive & Brain Sciences, Computer Science, and Music. His interests are in language cognition, the biological mechanisms that undergird second language acquisition, cognitive benefits associated with multilingualism, and Spanish.
- Steven Zhang is a rising junior at St. Mark's School. He is interested in general linguistics, Spanish, Mandarin, and English.
- Will Hutter is a rising senior at the Roxbury Latin School. He is interested in general linguistics, computational linguistics, Spanish, and Latin.
- Yifan Wu is a rising senior at Xiamen University, China, majoring in English. Her interests are in general linguistics.
- Yin Wang (GRS '23) is a rising second-year master's student in Linguistics. His interests are in semantics, experimental pragmatics, sociophonetics, and the psycholinguistics of bilingualism.
And a warm welcome back to Danielle, Felix, Jackson, Kate, Kevin, and Sam!
CISS grant for Chang
Congratulations to Prof. Chang on receiving an Undergraduate Research Assistance Grant from BU's Center for Innovation in Social Science to support student research in the lab in Summer 2022!
Chang at UC Santa Cruz
Prof. Chang will be giving a talk at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on May 9 in the Phonetics and Phonology Lunch (Phlunch) series. The title of his talk is "Multilingual phonological knowledge in speech perception and production".