Events

Conferences / Events / Faculty / Graduate Students / Research

Michigan State Presenting at LSA 2026

December 2, 2025

Five MSU linguists (including Sociolinguistics Lab members Mofart Ayiega & Leah Nodar) will be presenting their work at the Linguistics Society of America’s annual conference, taking place this year in New Orleans from January 8th – 11th!

Please find their talk titles below:

  • Mofart Ayiega (co-authored with Dr. Suzanne Wagner) – Morphological Leveling of Noun Class Agreement in Urban Swahili
  • Dr. Leah Nodar – Twelve Variables of Africatown English in 1927 and 1979
  • Jingying Xu (co-authored with Dr. Cristina Schmitt):
    • Beyond Truth Conditions: Context Modulates Telicity Interpretation
    • Learning Telicity in Context: Developmental Evidence from Mandarin Children
  • Ellie Xia (co-authored with Dr. Alan Hezao Ke) – Tonal Marking of Telicity in Hakka: An Agree-Based Analysis
  • John Ryan (co-authored with Yaxuan Wang) – Reference, Aspect, and Event Completion in Mandarin Sentence Judgments

Click ‘Continue Reading’ for abstracts.

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Conferences / Events / Faculty / Graduate Students / Research

MSU Linguists Presenting at NWAV 53

September 23, 2025

This November, Adam Barnhardt, Mofart Ayiega, Rose Fisher, Jess Shepherd, Connor Bechler, Annan Kirk, and Karthik Durvasula will be presenting at NWAV 53 (New Ways of Analyzing Variation) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor!

  • Adam will be presenting “Creaky voice: A women-led sub/exurban-centric sound change in white Michigan English“
  • Mofart will be presenting “Morphological Non-agreement on Animate Nouns in Swahili“
  • Rose will be presenting “Language Loyalty and Maintenance: The Case of Pennsylvania Dutch“
  • Jess will be presenting “Paths of sound change in the [mɪɾən]: /tən/ in two varieties of Michigan English”
  • Connor will be presenting “Modeling and Documenting Variation across Pumi Varieties“
  • Annan Kirk will be presenting “Really is really frequent: intensifiers and change in Michigan English“
  • Karthik will be presenting “Near mergers are compatible with categorical representations”

NWAV 53 will run from Nov. 5th – 7th. Register here.

Click ‘Continue Reading’ for abstracts.

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Conferences / Events / People / Research / Undergraduates

Socio Lab students present at UURAF

April 12, 2025

Undergraduate members of the Sociolinguistics Lab and/or the MI Diaries project team demonstrated their research skills at MSU’s 2025 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) on April 11, 2025. Presenters included:

  • Sabrina Ruiz, Who’s afraid of the Big Bad C*nt? Changes in offensiveness across generations.
    • Senior thesis project supervised by Dr. Betsy Sneller.
  • Sara Kirkman, Emoji and age: Exploring age-based variations in expressing emotions via emojis
    • Senior thesis project supervised by Dr. Betsy Sneller.
  • Xhanna Travina, A/B testing for engaging users with Knowledge Commons newsletter emails
    • Mentor: Larissa Babak (College of Arts and Letters)
  • Hannah Choi, Interpreting the simple past as the present perfect (with Jaina Kittle, Kay Humpert, Mason Dellot)
  • Ezekiel Brown, Verb agreement with non-DP subjects
Sabrina Ruiz with her UURAF poster
Xhanna Travina with her UURAF poster.

Continue ReadingSocio Lab students present at UURAF
Conferences / Events / Faculty / Graduate Students / People / Research / Undergraduates

MSU students, faculty, and alumni presenting at NWAV 52

October 15, 2024

The following people from the Sociolinguistics Lab will be presenting at NWAV 52 this year:

  • Adam Barnhardt is seeking expert input on the next stage of his ongoing project via a Project Launch poster titled: Patterns of social meanings indexed to Low-Back-Merger Shifted vowels in Michigan.
  • Connor Bechler will present prior work that he undertook at the University of Kentucky: Evaluating wav2vec2 speech recognition and forced alignment on a multi-varietal language documentation collection.
  • Jessica Shepherd, Drake Howard, and Betsy Sneller will present interim results from Jess’s first PhD qualifying paper research: Pronunciation in the [mɪɾən]: Post-tonic /t/ flapping in Michigan: a non-white male-led change.

Adam’s work and the study by Jess, Betsy, and Drake all use speech data from the MI Diaries project.

We’ll also be looking out for presentations by the former MSU people shown in bold below:

  • James Stanford, George Stain, Monica Nesbitt: Phonological foundations of ethnic divergence: The Low-Back Merger Shift and the African American Vowel Shift as opposite movements.
  • Kaitlyn Owens and Monica Nesbitt: Changing boundaries: Evidence from Northern Cities Shift categorical perception in Michigan.
  • Amalia Robinson, Monica Nesbitt and Xiao Dong: The phonology of Black women in Boston (across age, ethnicity, and style).
  • Xiao Dong, Fengming Liu, Monica Nesbitt, and Chien-Jer Charles Lin: Social perception of neutral tone and rhotacization in Mandarin Chinese: How do Beijing and Taiwan speakers differ and does place orientation matter?
  • Rebecca Roeder: /ay/ glide weakening in North Carolina and the origins of the Southern Vowel Shift.
  • Dennis Preston and Terumi Imai-Brandle: Reconstructing American English inputs in a globally available mass media product: Intensifiers in the television series Gilmore Girls.

See you in Miami!

Continue ReadingMSU students, faculty, and alumni presenting at NWAV 52