Successful Dissertation Defense!

Congratulations to TJ Martin, who recently defended his dissertation! It is entitled: A Sociophonetic Description of VOT in African American Language: A True Voicing Language. His work investigates the temporal, phonetic, and phonological properties of utterance initial stop consonants in African American Language (AAL), with a focus on Voice Onset Time (VOT) and speech rate across the Southeast region of the U.S. consisting of Washington D.C. (1968), Atlanta, Georgia (2017), and Princeville, North Carolina (2004). Using corpus-based phonetic analysis and linear mixed-effects modeling, the study provides a systematic, cross-temporal, and regionally diverse account of voicing patterns in AAL