Category: 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) 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.

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!

People / Undergraduates

Student successes beyond the lab

September 1, 2024

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/

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Mikayla Thompson working in the 3 Sisters Garden at the Nokomis Cultural Heritage Center in Okemos, Michigan.

Conferences / Events / People / Research / Undergraduates

Socio Lab members present (and win!) at MSU’s UURAF

May 14, 2024

Undergraduate students from the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab were well represented at the 2024 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) in April. Gage Landeryou and Caroline Zackerman shared research they conducted for their senior theses in Linguistics under the direction of lab co-director Betsy Sneller. Two other lab students, Drake Howard and Lin Cabada, presented on research that they had conducted for faculty supervisors in French and in Writing respectively. Gage Landeryou gave a winning presentation on transgender speech Gage Landeryou's study was titled ExpressING Gender: The effect of situational comfort on (ing) pronunciation in transgender speech. For this innovative work and for an engaging and professional style, Gage was awarded a prize for best oral presentation in the 'Social Sciences - General' category. Gage Landeryou, one of the two winners for oral presentation in the Social Sciences - General category. Students interacted with visitors and judges UURAF is a huge event. It can be really overwhelming for the in-person, on-site student presenters. According to MSU's UURAF 2024 website: The 26th UURAF was held onsite at the Breslin Center and online at Symposium. Over 1,000 students from 12 colleges participated in the event. They were mentored by over 600 faculty, staff, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and government/industry partners. There were over 700 presentations in 32 different subject areas. We're proud to report that Drake, Caroline, and Lin did a great job of explaining their posters to the many visitors and judges who came to see them. Caroline Zackerman explains her poster to a visitor at UURAF 2024. Drake Howard explains his poster to a UURAF 2024 visitor. Students' talks and abstracts Gage Landeryou ExpressING Gender: The Effect of Situational Comfort on (ING) Pronunciation in Transgender Speech This study explores sociolinguistic variation in the speech of binary transgender individuals. My main goal is to investigate how a speaker's comfort with their own gender expression impacts how much they style shift in their pronunciation of (ING) (e.g., pronouncing "running" either as running or runnin') between queer-friendly settings (like their home) versus public settings. Following the methodology of Gratton (2016), who found nonbinary individuals style shifting between private and public settings to avoid the threat of misgendering, I conducted sociolinguistic interviews with 4 binary trans individuals. Each person was interviewed first in their home, and then in a public and not explicitly queer-friendly environment (like a coffee shop). Interviews were transcribed and time aligned, and auditorily coded for pronunciation of (ING). The primary research question was: do trans speakers use their pronunciation of (ING) in public settings to mitigate the threat of being misgendered, in the same way that the nonbinary speakers in Gratton (2016) do?Presenter(s): Mentor: Betsy Sneller (Linguistics) Caroline Zackerman Canadian Raising and Metalinguistic Awareness in Michigan English Canadian Raising is a phonological rule by which the /ay/ diphthong raises before voiceless coda consonants (as in the word PRICE) (Chambers 1973). Speakers of Michigan English do exhibit regular Canadian Raising of /ay/; however, they often consider Canadian Raising to be a uniquely…

Read more about the article Socio Lab members present (and win!) at MSU’s UURAF

Events / Faculty / Graduate Students / Undergraduates

Grandparents University 2023

September 27, 2023

MSU Grandparents University is an opportunity for grandparents and grandchildren (ages 8-12) to come together for a three-day educational experience while spending time together on the MSU campus in the summer. This past summer, MSU Sociolinguistics led two courses.

As usual, we ran Harry Potter and the Secrets of British English, which has been a hit at Grandparents University since 2009! In this session, participants are whisked off to Hogwarts for classes in Potions (British/US English madlibs), Charms (IPA transcription), Defense Against the Dark Arts (British regional accents) and History of Magic (a brief lecture on language change).

And we had a new course: Diary of a Michigan Kid. In this class, we taught participants about keeping an audio diary, pronunciation differences, and generational differences in language. All of the activities and materials were co-designed by faculty and students on the lab’s MI Diaries project team. We think that the “Kids vs Grands” activity was the most fun. See below for some pictures from Diary of a Michigan Kid.

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