Linguistics

This summer, rising second-years Audrey Keener and Nicholas Eiffert worked in the lab of Penn linguist Jianjing Kuang studying vowel articulation in song, running an in-person experiment and built a corpus of classical recordings by famous singers.

Michele W. Berger ・August 19, 2022

The GSE master’s student from Uganda taught the first ever course on this language in the spring of 2022. This fall the program continues with another intro class, followed by an advanced class next spring.

Michele W. Berger ・August 17, 2022

The open-access, online-only Glossa Psycholinguistics recently published its inaugural issue after more than two years of effort from Penn linguist Florian Schwarz and colleagues around the world.

Michele W. Berger ・May 12, 2022

Research from postdoc Lacey Wade confirmed this idea, what she calls expectation-driven convergence, in a controlled experiment for the first time. The work reveals just how much the subconscious factors into the way people speak.

Michele W. Berger ・April 5, 2022

Since the 1980s, linguist Eugene Buckley has studied this Native American language, now spoken by just a dozen or so people in northern California. In collaboration with members and descendants of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, he’s built a database of Kashaya words, sounds, and stories.

Michele W. Berger ・November 5, 2021

Season three of the School of Arts & Sciences podcast explores scientific ideas that get big reactions.

From OMNIA ・November 1, 2021

Researchers led by postdoc Colin Twomey and professor Joshua Plotkin developed an algorithm that can infer the communicative needs different linguistic communities place on colors.

Katherine Unger Baillie ・September 23, 2021

Largely characterized as a Gen Z phenomenon, TikTok is a video-sharing app with more than 100 million active users in the U.S. alone—and it’s changing the way that we speak, says sociolinguist Nicole Holliday.

Kristina García ・August 26, 2021

In a study of college-educated biracial men, ages 18 to 32, sociolinguist Nicole Holliday found that, when asked about race, this group frequently brought up law enforcement unprompted and discussed the subject using vocal tone more generally associated with white speakers.

Michele W. Berger ・July 21, 2021

Labels for what happened Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol were very different from those used to describe the Black Lives Matter movement or the 2020 election results. How much weight do individual words actually have? It depends on the context.

Michele W. Berger ・January 21, 2021