Marianne Huijsmans receives the Community-University Engagement Support fund
Congratulations to Linguistics PhD student Marianne Huijsmans, who is one of six Faculty of Arts recipients of the Community-University Engagement Support fund, for a community project on “Reviewing, enriching, and sharing an ʔayʔaǰuθəm e-dictionary.” The community partner is Jacqueline Mathieu, of the Klahoose First Nation. The funding is paid directly to community partners, and is […]
Khia Johnson successfully defends her dissertation
Khia Johnson successfully defended her dissertation “Crosslinguistic Similarity and Structured Variation in Cantonese-English Bilingual Speech Production” on Friday! Also, Khia has landed a very cool job as UX Researcher at Reality Labs Research, Audio, which is part of Facebook/Meta. Congratulations, Dr. Johnson!
Anne-Michelle’s podcast
Anne-Michelle’s 2018 shitgibbons paper, with Michael Becker (Umass Amherst), has led to an interview about total vowel harmony in obscene insults. In the episode of Nerdin’ About, Dr Anne-Michelle Tessier takes everyone on phonological foray into swear words. Content warning: Swearing. Lots. At any rate, if you are so inclined, you can listen here: https://nerdinabout.podbean.com/e/science-of-swearing
Rose-Marie Déchaine has been promoted to the rank of Professor
Rose-Marie Déchaine has been promoted to the rank of Professor effective July 1, 2021. Huge congratulations, Professor Déchaine!
Chelsea Jang wins the Edna Dharmaratne Award
Chelsea Jang has been honored with the Edna Dharmaratne Award in Linguistics (2021) in recognition of her volunteerism and service. Chelsea is a third-year Speech Sciences Major, with a Minor in Special Education, and also the current SALSA Undergrad Rep. Congrats Chelsea! The Dharmaratne Award is named after the linguistics department’s former head administrator, who […]
Marci Sóskuthy promoted to associate professor
Márton Sóskuthy has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Congratulations, Marci!
PhD alumna Heather Bliss wins CLA early career researcher award
Heather Bliss, who graduated from the doctoral program in 2013 and is currently a lecturer at Simon Fraser University, has been selected to receive the Canadian Linguistic Association Early Career Researcher Award. She was recognized for achievements in research across subfields and community engagement.
Joash Gambarage wins UBC public engagement award
Doctoral program alumnus and Swahili lecturer Joash Gambarage was been awarded the inaugural Public Engagement Award from UBC’s Public Humanities Hub. The award recognizes his efforts as a regional ambassador for the Swahili language.
Strang Burton promoted
Strang Burton has been promoted to associate professor of teaching, with tenure, making him the first associate professor of teaching in the department.
Nicolai and Lo win international pronunciation prediction competition
Garrett Nicolai and Roger Lo have won the SIGMORPHON Shared Task on Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion for low-resource languages. The challenge was to develop a computational system that predicts the pronunciation of words from their spelling. Their submission trained on Adyghe, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Khmer, Latvian, Maltese, Romanian, Slovene, and Welsh.