Graduate Students

Conferences / Events / Faculty / Graduate Students / Research

MSU Linguists Accepted at NWAV

September 23, 2025

This November, Adam Barnhardt, Mofart Ayiega, Rose Fisher, Jess Shepherd, Connor Bechler, 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“
  • 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.

Continue ReadingMSU Linguists Accepted at NWAV
Faculty / Graduate Students / Publications

Sneller & Greeson Published in Penn Working Papers in Linguistics

September 1, 2025

Prof. Betsy Sneller (MSU) and PhD candidate Daniel Greeson (Stony Brook University)’s paper “Distinct Phonological Reanalysis Patterns in Michigan English TRAP” was recently published in Proceedings of the 48th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference. The article is available on UPenn’s repository.

Congratulations, Betsy and Daniel!

Continue ReadingSneller & Greeson Published in Penn Working Papers in Linguistics
Alumni / Graduate Students / Research

Emily Duggan Successfully Defends M.A. Thesis

September 1, 2025

This July, Emily Duggan (MA Linguistics 2025) successfully defended her thesis “Lesbian vs. Dyke: An examination of the differences in social meaning between two queer identity terms”. Emily was advised by Prof. Suzanne Wagner, and her committee included Suzanne, Betsy Sneller, and Karthik Durvasula.

The thesis is currently available on ProQuest and will later become available on the MSU Library’s thesis archive.

Congratulations, Emily!

Continue ReadingEmily Duggan Successfully Defends M.A. Thesis
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