Joshua Meyer and Empower Blind People (a community-based organization in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan), are collaborating to create speech synthesis software for the Kyrgyz language which will be used in an open-source screen-reading program (NVDA) for visually impaired people.

Joshua has conducted research previously in Bishkek, supported by a research fellowship from the American University of Central Asia's Central Asian Studies Institute.

Joshua Meyer, a computational linguistics PhD student working on automatic speech recognition for low resource languages, has been awarded an NSF GROW grant as well as a STEM Chateaubriand Fellowship (from the French Embassy in the United States) to conduct research in France.

These awards are supporting a collaboration between Joshua and Lori Lamel and Jean-Luc Gauvain at the Spoken Language Processing Group at LIMSI-CNRS.

In Spring 2017, Colleen Patton will be a visiting researcher at Université Rennes 2 in France as one of 17 national recipients of the Chateaubriand Fellowship for Humanities and Social Sciences. The Fellowship funds 4 months of dissertation research for Colleen. Prof. Stefan Moal will be her dissertation co-advisor and her research supervisor while in France.

Beginning February 2017, Colleen will be based in Rennes to conduct focus group and individual interviews with a variety of... Read more

3rd year PhD student Colleen Patton completed a 5 week internship at the Ionad Chaluim Chille Ìle (The Columba Center Islay). Ionad Chaluim Chille Ìle is a language and culture center located in Bowmore, Islay. Outside of general office and reception duties, Colleen was primarily tasked with the reorganization and management of materials collected under an oral history project, Seanchas Ìle, which took place 10 years ago. With input from her coworkers at ICCI, Colleen created videos that... Read more

Noah Nelson represented the department at the International Workshop on Language Production (IWLP) in La Jolla, CA this past July, presenting research done with Dr. Andy Wedel on the nature of lexical competition and how it affects the realization of voice onset time in the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech. Noah will be presenting further research on how competition affects vowel duration at the Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) at USC in October.

Prof Heidi Harley is an invited speaker at the Stanford workshop, "On the status of head movement in lingusitic theory," being held at Stanford Sept 16-17, 2016. Her presentation is entitled, "What Hiaki stem forms are really telling us," and is scheduled for Saturday Sept. 17. The full program and description of the workshop can be found here:

John Matthew has joined the Douglass Phonetics Lab as a visiting scholar. He is a faculty member in the Department of English Studies at Chuo University in Japan.

William Cotter, third year PhD student in Anthropology and Linguistics, and his colleague Uri Horesh (University of Essex), have published a survey article on the state of the field in Arabic sociolinguistics. The article, entitled “Current Research on Linguistic Variation in the Arabic Speaking World” surveys the development of research on language variation and change within Arabic speaking communities spanning the decade and a half from the publication of Niloofar Haeri’s influential... Read more