Category: Undergraduates

Honors Students Present Sociolinguistic Research at UURAF

September 9, 2026

Over the course of the 2025-2026 academic year, Dr. Betsy Sneller and Dr. Suzanne Wagner led an Honors Research Seminar on the MI Diaries project for Honors undergraduate students at Michigan State. During this time, students of the seminar designed and executed original sociolinguistic research projects and presented their findings in poster format at the University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum in April 2026 (read more about UURAF and the linguistics and languages students who presented). Congratulations, Honors Seminar members! Lab member Lin Cabada also presented an independent research project that grew from an Honors Option paper they completed for Dr. Wagner's Language and Gender class in Fall 2025. Here's a list of the presenters and their poster titles: Mary Cavagnetto and Elle Jacobson / How do people talk about accents in Michigan’s Thumb and UP? / Betsy Sneller and Suzanne Wagner Chae Eun Park and Keira Wesley / Social perceptions of uh vs. um / Betsy Sneller and Suzanne Wagner Rachel Ross / “So, uhm, yeah”: A case study of uhm development between 5-9 years old / Betsy Sneller and Suzanne Wagner Lily Kwon and Bai Yang Clemens / Is “low-key” going low-key adverbial? / Suzanne Wagner and Betsy Sneller Connor Mason / A lowkey examination of lowkey in the MI Diaries corpus / Suzanne Wagner and Betsy Sneller (with assistance from Adam Barnhardt) Allison Phillips, Antony Tokrri, Jad Assaf / “Pretty” is pretty cool / Suzanne Wagner and Betsy Sneller (with assistance from Annan Kirk) Lin Cabada / Gender-marked occupational terms at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum / Suzanne Wagner Allison Phillips, Antony Tokrri, and Jad Assaf Bai Yang Clemens and Lily Kwon Mary Cavagnetto and Elle Jacobson Lin Cabada Connor Mason Keira Wesley Rachel Ross

Research / Undergraduates

Connor Mason Accepted to First American Dialect Society Research Incubator

September 4, 2026

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!

Alumni / Conferences / Events / Faculty / Graduate Students / People / Research / Undergraduates

MSU (socio)linguists reunited at NWAV 53

November 21, 2025

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!

Read more about the article MSU (socio)linguists reunited at NWAV 53

(l-r back) Jie Liu, Mingzhe Zheng, Anthony Tokrri, Alison Phillips, Wil Rankinen, Connor Bechler, Karthik Durvasula, Jack Rechsteiner, Sophie Motawi, Drake Howard, [unknown], Millie Hacker, Adam Barnhardt. (l-r front) Shuyang Wei, Monica Nesbitt, [unknown], Bai Yang Clemens, Lily Kwon, Rose Fisher, Annan Kirk, Betsy Sneller, Jess Shepherd, Julia Bolash, Connor Mason, Suzanne Evans Wagner, [unknown].

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) 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!