Eric Brown has just received a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation

From the program website:

“The Graduate Research Fellowship provides three years of support for graduate study leading to research-based master’s or doctoral degrees and is intended for students who are in the early stages of their graduate study. The Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) invests in graduate education for a cadre of diverse individuals who demonstrate their potential to successfully complete graduate degree programs in disciplines relevant to the mission of the National Science Foundation.”

Congratulations, Eric!

Eric Brown has received a grant from the International Institute to go to Cape Verde this summer to begin a project looking at Cape Verdean Creole phonology, variation and orthographic reform.

Congratulations, Eric!

Lauren Squires and Robin Queen have received a grant from the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching to assess the use of the Bluestream Media database, a collection of appromimately 800 video and audio clips that illustrate various sociolinguistic principles.  They will be investigating the effectiveness of the database for teaching and learning core sociolinguistic and general linguistic concepts and principles.

Jeff Heath expects to receive official confirmation soon of a three-year continuation grant from the National Science Foundation as part of a long-term fieldwork project on the 20 or so languages of the Dogon family in Mali, West Africa. Other fieldworkers on the project will be Steve Moran (U Washington grad student), Kirill Prokhorov (Russian grad student), and Abbie Hantgan (Indiana U grad student). Kirill and Abbie also did fieldwork under the expiring three-year grant, while Steve has been the website administrator. Another student, Laura McPherson, is finishing her current fieldwork and will enroll in the UCLA Linguistics PhD program this fall.

Sally Thomason has been a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies for March, 2009.

Sally recently gave an invited lecture at the Workshop on Language Contact at FRAIS entitled, “Contact-induced language change sociolinguistics vs. historical linguistics?”

Abstract:

In studying language change, sociolinguists and historical linguists address the issues from very different perspectives.  Sociolinguists focus on ongoing change; historical linguists study past changes.  At least in part because of this difference in perspective, it sometimes seems as if the two groups of scholars are talking past each other rather than to each other.  In this paper I’ll argue that the respective sets of data should in fact permit compatible analyses, because any viable theory must surely encompass both synchronic variation and diachronic change.

Kate Rice, one of our undergraduate concentrators, has received the Donald J. Cohen Fellowship in Developmental Social Neuroscience, a two year fellowship at Yale University. The primary project she’ll be working on is a prospective, longitudinal study of children from birth to 36 months.  One of the biggest components right now is eyetracking research.  The project hopes to be able to diagnosis autism sooner based on early differences in the tracking of social scenes.

Congratulations Kate!

Dina Kapetangianni has been awarded a 2009-2010 Constantine Tsangadas Fellowship for research in post-Classical Greece.

Congratulations Dina!

Julie Boland and Robin Queen received a Faculty Research Award jointly from the Office for the Vice President for Research and the LSA Dean’s Office for their work on exploring the relationship between grammatical and natural gender in both implicit and explicit discrimination tasks.

Acrisio Pires received a UofM faculty grant and award to work on the research project “Acquisition of syntax: Implications for theories of language change and dialectal variation.”

The project aims at continuing experimental work testing adults (monolingual and bilingual heritage speakers), children and teenagers. The goal is to evaluate whether native knowledge of syntax and semantics can be affected by (late) exposure to a (standard) dialect showing grammatical properties which are no longer productive in colloquial/vernacular dialects.

Chris Odato has received a Graduate Student Research Award from the Institute for Research on Women and Gender for work on his dissertation.

Congratulations, Chris!