Liam Bassford and Maggie LaBelle both spent time this summer working in Morgan Sonderegger’s Montreal Language Modelling Lab (MLML). They annotated many, many word-initial stops, both voiced and voiceless, to add to Morgan’s data on phonetic variation in the reality TV show, Big Brother UK. Maggie also worked with Thea Knowles (BA ’14) on Plotmish, the interface that Misha Schwartz (also BA ’14) created to measure and annotate vowel formants as another way of modelling phonetic variation.
Hannah Cohen spent this summer working for Morgan at MLML and Michael at ProsodyLab. At MLML, she wrote python scripts to analyze data and organize the lab. For ProsodyLab, she was doing truncation, annotation, alignment, and also ran participants in experiments.
Cora Lesure traveled to Barcelona, and where she spent time thinking about language planning, bilingualism, minority language politics and the like. She reports that she was reminded a lot of Montreal, and is now interested in researching the similarities and differences in these bilingual cities. Cora also started reading about spoken Hawaiian and was reminded of some of the nominal classificatory systems she learned about in LING 410 Structure of Mayan last year.
Jielin Liu attended an Amazonian linguistics summer field school in Peru in July. She spent the first two weeks studying theoretical concepts in Amazonian and Andean linguistics in the PUCP campus in Lima. For the second half of the course, the group traveled to the Peruvian Amazon to do field work on Kakataibo (Panoan). They created a small multilingual dictionary and recorded an oral history.
Joyce Xiao worked this summer for Postdoctoral Fellow Jakob Leimgruber. She also put her Linguistics skill to work helping friends who are trying to learn English and Japanese.