Congrats!! I’ve been telling my students about this work of yours for a couple of years, so I’m excited to see it written up!!

Hypercorrect Moun[thɨn] in Utah English Abstract This study analyzes unstressed /tən/ in words like button, kitten, and mountain. In Utah, there are three variants: North American mainstream [ʔn̩], forticized [thɨn], and local [ʔɨn]. While ...

‼️🔔 My paper, "Hypercorrect Moun[tʰɨn] in Utah English", has now been published in English World-Wide. 🎉🥳🎊

tl;dr: Utahns say [tʰ] in words like "mountain" more than people in other regions.

www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...

Thank you!! ☺️

Super excited to share that my Afrikaans paper has been published! Following in the footsteps of Coetzee et al. (2018), I examine age and gender effects in the ongoing tonogenesis in Afrikaans. 📖 Open access here:

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

This is actually the worst thing I’ve seen from federal granting agencies thus far.

A screenshot of an email from an unidentified student. The text says, "additionally, i heard through the grapevine that students are sending you cat photos, so also attached are some from me."

I genuinely don't know how this started, but I absolutely love it 🐈‍⬛

After we released this bonus episode, very talented listener Melody sent us these photos of her own crocheted model of the vocal tract! She kindly gave us permission to share them publicly.

If you too have a crocheted vocal tract that you've made, please send us pictures, we'd love to see more!

It’s fun to catch up with friends at #LSA2025 & #ADS2025, and WOTY is always a highlight.

But nothing will beat @mkb933.bsky.social GIVING A TALK ON SOMEONE ELSE’S BEHALF (not a coauthor!), on short notice, while chairing the session, and then taking questions to pass on to authors.

Legendary.

Proud to be a linguistic chaos gremlin.

ChatGPT linked to declining academic performance and memory loss in new study New research uncovers a concerning trend: while ChatGPT might aid students under academic pressure, its excessive use is linked to procrastination, memory loss, and poorer grades, highlighting a negat...

Increased reliance on ChatGPT was associated with higher levels of procrastination and memory loss, and a negative impact on academic performance, as reflected in students’ grade point averages.”

www.psypost.org/chatgpt-link...

2024 Word of the Year Is “Rawdog” - American Dialect Society Philadelphia Marriott Downtown–Jan. 10—The American Dialect Society, in its 35th annual words-of-the-year vote, selected rawdog as the Word of the Year for 2024. More than three hundred attendees took...

"Rawdog" is the 2024 American Dialect Society word of the year. Read the full press release. #WOTY2024 #ADS2025 #LSA2025 americandialect.org/2024-word-of...

William Labov, ‘father of sociolinguistics’ who studied the Philadelphia accent, dies at 97 William Labov's work changed whose dialects linguists saw worthy of study and dove into the socioeconomic politics of language. He is considered the father of sociolinguistics.

A lovely obituary for Bill Labov in the Inquirer.

An all-black cat is laying inside of a cream-colored, plush, fish-shaped cat bed. The fish’s mouth is huge and what provides the opening into the dome-shaped bed. The shadows inside the bed make the cat blend in with the darkness, but two large, round, yellow eyes are visible, looking right at the camera. The cat’s expression is hard to read, but she looks curious and possibly amused or playful.

Behold my void, Mira, in her fishy bed

Vale William Labov.

Inspired by a colleague on X, I think my favourite Bill Labov quote is:

“I have resisted the term *sociolinguistics* for many years, since it implies that there can be a successful linguistic theory or practice which is not social.”

Thank you for everything, Bill.

Phase Transition xkcd.com/3025

Histogram showing time to publication of papers in years; distribution centers on about 3/5 years

Just did a calculation of our lab's time from project conception to publication (e-pub) over the past x years. We're averaging 3.5 years from the first idea to acceptance. About 6-9 months of this is review time. Don't know how typical this is but good reality check esp. for trainees.

A shiny and new white coffee mug sits on an ocean blue desk mat. The mug has black writing on it that says, “Ain’t no party like a fricative party ‘cuz a fricative party don’t stop.” There is also a beautiful floral embellishment on the mug with shades of pink, green, blue, and yellow.

A student just gave me the best gift and I will treasure it forever 😭🤍

Can I please be added?

The official motto of experimental linguists anyone?

The alveolar trill is perceived as jagged/rough by speakers of different languages Typological research shows that across languages, trilled [r] sounds are more common in adjectives describing rough as opposed to smooth surfaces. In this study

I'm excited to share our new study on cross-modal iconicity from our special issue in JASA! We show [r] is rough and [l] is smooth even in languages that conflate them within one phoneme. The effect is even stronger than the bouba/kiki effect!

📊When teaching or giving a talk, do you like presenting plots step by step, revealing e.g. one group at a time? This is often useful for walking through complex results.

I made a R package that makes it extremely easy to do this!

ggreveal: Reveal a ggplot incrementally
#rstats #dataviz #ggplot2

A sticker on a light post in Cambridge, reading "All stickers except stickers about stickers being prohibited are prohibited."

One for the syntax folk
🐦🐦

This is a picture of three fully-grown cats, sitting in a triangle, with a small, pink, wooden bird-feeder in the middle. In the right corner, a gray tabby is laying on the floor, trying to sniff the feeder. In the left corner a tortie is sitting down, and at the triangle tip nearest the camera is an all-black cat, laying facing the feeder. All seem very enthralled with this new object.

We recently got a bird feeder. Best idea ever — we’re feeding the birds, providing endless entertainment for our cats, *and* getting bonus entertainment for us as the cats sit glued to the window going ekekek

an intentionally ugly shirt that is absolutely covered in images of the only acceptable Praat logo: the original, which is so ugly that it's awesome

look upon my works ye mighty and despair

praatpicture 1.2.0 is now on CRAN, time for a HYPE THREAD 👀💅💯💥🍾🎉🎆

Minority genders in quantitative survey research: a data-driven approach to clear, inclusive, and accurate gender questions Whilst linguistic research on speakers of minority genders has increased in the past decade, much less is known about how they can best be included in broader (socio)linguistic research. The current p...

Ever wondered how to ask inclusive, clear and accurate gender questions in survey research? But not had any data support your best guesses?

Very excited to announce we have a new paper out in Linguistics Vanguard investigating exactly that! (Out now! Open Access!)
www.degruyter.com/document/doi...

A completed coloring sheet reads “every body has an accent,” with an arm with IPA tattoos, signing hands, and a mouth

I have some coloring sheets your language and #linguistics classes might enjoy for some finals season de-stressing! Here’s one of my students’ work!

sites.google.com/view/ear-sci...

Lego Set Department Store, 16+

Lego Creator Expert: The Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores

Roses are red
Shapes have no sound
Except kikis are pointy
And boubas are round

Neopronouns interview study interest form This form is to express interest in participating in an interview study conducted by Professor Kirby Conrod at Swarthmore College. Completing this interest form is just to give us a way to contact ...

Hey, I'm finally recruiting for a paid study! This is for anyone over 18 and fluent in English who uses neopronouns (like "xe," "fae," "thon," etc) as their personal pronouns. If you're interested, you can sign up to receive more information at the link below! Please share far and wide!!