Undergraduate Connor Mason's abstract investigating the syntax and sociolinguistics of Lowkey, "A Lowkey investigation of Lowkey," was recently accepted to the American Dialect Society's first Research Incubator. The Research Incubator is an opportunity to get feedback on work in progress for early-career researchers. Congratulations Connor!
The NWAV 53 conference (November 5-7, 2025) was a big success for MSU linguistics! In addition to presenters, our general crew included alumni of the MSU Linguistics PhD program (Mingzhe Zheng, Monica Nesbitt) and Second Language Studies program (Jie Liu); MSU Linguistics MA (Jack Rechsteiner); and MSU Linguistics BA (Wil Rankinen). In addition to Betsy Sneller and Suzanne Wagner, faculty were represented by Karthik Durvasula (Linguistics, phonetics/phonology) and Rose Fisher (German). We were also delighted to include undergraduates from the Honors Seminar that Betsy and Suzanne are co-teaching 2025-2026 and from the Sociolinguistics Lab, as well as current graduate students. Here's to another great NWAV in 2026 in Montreal!
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) Mentors: Alan Munn, Cristina Schmitt (Linguistics) - Language Acquisition Lab Ezekiel Brown, Verb agreement with non-DP subjects Mentors: Alan Munn, Louis Konkoly (Linguistics) - Language Acquisition Lab Sabrina Ruiz with her UURAF poster Xhanna Travina with her UURAF poster.
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!
In the last few months, current and former lab members have been featured in the College of Arts and Letters news. Here's a roundup: Caroline Zackerman received a Fulbright grant Caroline graduated in spring 2024. She joined the lab as a freshman Professorial Assistant to Dr. Betsy Sneller, worked on the MI Diaries project in a variety of roles, and then became the project manager. Her senior thesis was supervised by Dr. Sneller. Thanks to a Fulbright grant, Caroline is now in Madrid working as an English teaching assistant. Mikayla Thompson created gardens for teaching Indigenous culture Mikayla graduated in spring 2023. Her senior thesis was advised by Dr. Wagner. You can read more about Mikayla's project in this news article, Indigenous Language Revitalization a Top Priority for Linguistics Student (November 2023). More recently, Mikayla was featured in an article about her work in establishing special gardens at MSU and at the nearby Nokomis Cultural Center. Mikayla uses the gardens to educate the public about Indigenous farming practices and cultures. https://cal.msu.edu/news/msu-graduate-creates-gardens-to-preserve-and-protect-indigenous-culture/ Julia Bolash received a prestigious award for MSU freshmen Julia started at MSU in fall 2024. She received a very competitive award, an MSU Alumni Distinguished Scholarship, which covers her tuition, room, and board for up to 8 semesters. Only 13 incoming students received an ADS this year! Julia is currently working as a Professorial Assistant to Dr. Betsy Sneller. https://cal.msu.edu/news/incoming-first-year-students-receive-prestigious-alumni-distinguished-scholarships/ Zhanna Yakubova completed an internship abroad Zhanna has been associated with the lab for a couple of years and she is currently the Social Media Manager for the MI Diaries project. This role builds on Zhanna's internship in summer 2023 in Argentina, where she worked on social media and web design for a non-profit, Observatorio Social. https://cal.msu.edu/news/theatre-and-linguistics-major-gains-broader-global-experience-with-internship-abroad/
