Alex Mason, a current MA student who has been accepted into our PhD program. We're glad you're staying, Alex! Alex will take his MA exam this semester, and is already preparing a sociolinguistics comp paper on the status short-e in the Lansing area Northern Cities Shift. He is also collaborating with Gabriela Alfaraz on a language attitudes project.
Monica Nesbitt, who presented a paper at the Linguistic Society of America 2016 meeting. Ambisyllabic consonants are codas: evidence from a syllable tracking task (with Karthik Durvasula). Monica successfully defended this project as a phonology comp paper in December 2015.
Mingzhe Zheng, who brought his ongoing work on Chinese-American accommodation to the Northern Cities Shift to NWAV 44 as a poster. Mingzhe successfully defended this project as a sociolinguistics comp paper in December 2015. He is now ABD.
Madeline Shellgren, who presented a paper at NWAV 44, Individual differences in listener perceptions: personality or cognitive processing?. Maddie has been preparing this project for a sociolinguistics comp paper.
Chenchen Xu, who presented a paper at NWAV 44 on attitudes to syllable contraction in dialects of Mandarin across China. Chenchen is currently writing up this project for her sociolinguistics comp paper defense.
Matt Savage, Erin Pevan, Alex Mason, Monica Nesbitt and Suzanne Wagner, who have presented their work on the Northern Cities Shift in Greater Lansing at NWAV 44 and the American Dialect Society 2016 annual meeting. They were invited to contribute to the Penn Working Papers in Linguistics volume "Selected Proceedings from NWAV 44". This is a tough proceedings to get into, so we were honored to be chosen. Watch for our paper to appear online this fall.
Suzanne Wagner, who presented a joint paper with Robin Dodsworth (North Carolina State) on coding corpora for speaker socioeconomic status at the LSA Satellite Workshop on Preparing Your Corpus for Archival Storage. Suzanne was awarded tenure in July 2015 and is now Associate Professor of Linguistics.