Lab member Jess Shepherd (Linguistics PhD) recently had a paper published in the Journal of English Linguistics. The paper is titled “LTH Affrication: A sociolinguistic indicator in the American West” and is authored by Joey Stanley (Brigham Young University) and Jess Shepherd.
Congratulations, Jess!
Suzanne Evans Wagner has published a brief invited paper in the brand new Journal of Language and Aging Research, for which she serves on the inaugural advisory board. The paper, titled Including older adults in variationist sociolinguistics via mobile self-recording, talks about the success that the lab’s MI Diaries project has had with collecting self-recorded ‘audio diaries’ (see Sneller, Wagner, and Ye 2022). Wagner suggests that similar mobile apps could be appealingly low-friction routes for older speakers to contribute to sociolinguistic research.
One of our lab co-directors, Dr. Betsy Sneller, recently had a paper published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The article is titled “Sample size matters in calculating Pillai scores”, and it is authored by Joey Stanley (Brigham Young University) and Betsy Sneller.
Some of the lab’s ongoing research into sound change in the Lansing area has been published as a chapter in The Low Back Merger Shift: Uniting the Canadian Vowel Shift, the California Vowel Shift, and Short Front Vowel Shifts across North America, edited by Kara Becker. Our chapter is titled “A tale of two shifts: Movement toward the Low Back Merger Shift in Lansing, Michigan“, and it’s authored by Monica Nesbitt, Suzanne Evans Wagner and Alexander Mason. We provide a preliminary sketch of the advance of the Low Back Merger Shift (what we have previously called the ‘Elsewhere Shift’ in other work) among Lansing speakers born in the 1900s through the 1990s.
In time for NWAV 47, the selected papers from NWAV 46 have just been released. Edited by Jordan Kodner and Lacey Wade, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 24.2: Selected Papers from NWAV 46 includes articles by MSU researchers Monica Nesbitt, Suzanne Evans Wagner and Sayako Uehara:
Both papers explore the sound change in progress we’re observing in Michigan from the Northern Cities Shift to a new vowel system that has various names in the literature, including the Elsewhere Shift, the Low Back Merger Shift and the Third Dialect.