Alan Mishler has received the highly competitive Marshall Sahlins Social Science award from the Honors College. The Marshall Sahlins award is part of the Goldstein Honors prizes, a set of prizes estalished to recognize scholarly excellence and outstanding achievement.
Alan received the prize based on his many academic strengths as well as his service and leadership on campus.
Alan’s thesis, Voice Onset Time in Japanese Voiceless Stops: Domain-initial Strengthening and Perceptual Salience, is an acoustic and perceptual investigation of domain-initial strengthening in Japanese. The goal of the acoustic study was to determine whether a set of Japanese consonants exhibited domain-initial—in particular, word-initial—strengthening. It did, which led to the perceptual study, whose goal was to assess whether native Japanese speaking listeners could use the acoustic consequences of strengthening to identify word onset. The perceptual study addresses whether strengthening is perceptually useful.
Congratulations, Alan!