William M. Cotter, Jessica Ray, and Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson, all joint Ph.D. students in Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Arizona recently traveled to Minneapolis, MN to present their research at the 115th meeting of the American Anthropological Association. William delivered a paper on discourse within professional barista competitions and the links between these forms of discourse and broader transnational economic regimes that effect the global coffee industry. Together... Read more

Joint Anthropology & Linguistics PhD students William M. Cotter, Jessica Ray, and Priscilla Shin traveled to Simon Fraser University in Vancouver to present their research at the 45th meeting of the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference. All three students presented results from their ongoing research conducted in the Department of Linguistics and School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. William was also awarded a $525 travel grant from the organizing committee of NWAV... Read more

Doctoral students William Cotter, Skye Anderson, and Elise Bell were recently awarded a $1,000 Research and Projects Grant from the Graduate and Professional Student Council to study the phonetics of Hijazi Arabic, a variety of Arabic spoken in western Saudi Arabia. The project will investigate a set of consonants in Arabic that show considerable phonetic variation across different Arabic varieties and will provide an acoustic account of how these consonants affect surrounding sounds.

The American Indian Language Development Institute teamed up with UA Linguists and the Gila River Indian Community's Huhugam Heritage Center to offer a workshop for Native American community members on the development of digital language resources for their communities on September 19-20. The workshop was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation's Documenting Endangered Languages Program (NSF-DEL, BCS-1160394) Leading the two-day workshop were Shannon Bischoff (UA... Read more

Joint Anthropology and Linguistics PhD student William Cotter was awarded a travel grant from the organizing committee of New Ways of Analyzing Variation (supported by the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University) to attend the 45th meeting of the conference. This year's NWAV meeting will be held from November 2nd - 6th, 2016 at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. William will be presenting a poster based on his research on morphophonemic change in Palestinian... Read more

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