SURF Mentoring

Potential projects/topics: General topic areas: phonetics, phonology, and language documentation

Types of projects: students could either work with me on an existing corpus of Ninde, an endangered Oceanic language of Vanuatu, or on a novel project, which would involve data collection.

Working on Ninde would entail annotating and analyzing acoustic data in order to understand and describe the structure of the language's sound system. For example, how does stress work? Is stress predictable?

Novel projects could do any of the following: examine social variation in phonetic production (aka pronunciation); examine perception, e.g., if a sound is ambiguous or less prototypical, how do listeners classify it; describe and document any language variety the student may be interested in (for example: English dialects, Spanish dialects, Vietnamese dialects, or minoritized and/or understudied languages).

I am also open to other possibilities!

Potential skills gained: acoustic analysis; statistical analysis; writing in the social sciences; experimental design; phonetic transcription

Required qualifications or skills: Preferably Linguistics majors or students who have at least take Ling 200 (Intro to Ling). However, if a student is very interested in the topic and willing to put in some additional time to cover the basics during the first couple weeks of the program, I am happy to work with students of any major.

Direct mentor: Faculty/P.I.