MONTHLY ROUNDUP
February 2020 Monthly Roundup
Congratulations
S On February 7, NOORTJE DE WEERS successfully defended her PhD thesis on "A Critical (Re-)assessment of the Effect of Speaker Ethnicity on Speech Processing and Evaluation". Her examining committee members included senior supervisor Dr. Murray Munro, supervisors Dr. Tracey Derwing and Dr. Yue Wang, examiner Dr. Elina Birmingham, and external examiner Dr. Molly Babel of the University of British Columbia.
Colloquium
S On February 27, the spring 2020 colloquia series started off with a lecture by University of British Columbia associate professor STEFAN DOLLINGER on "The Pluricentricity Debate: Retrospect and Prospect of Austrian German, Canadian English and Other Non-Dominant Standard Varieties".
This semester, we have a big speaker line-up with five more colloquiums scheduled for March and April. Everyone is welcome to attend, and more details can be found on the Linguistics Colloquia page.
> LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIA SCHEDULE
In The News
S Professor MURRAY MUNRO and adjunct professor TRACEY DERWING's study on "Foreign Accent, Comprehensibility, and Intelligibility in the Speech of Second Language Learners" was highlighted in a recent article in Psychology Today.
The study was originally published in Language Learning in 1995, making this year its 25th anniversary. In recognition of this milestone, the study has been selected as the focus for a special issue of the Journal of Second Language Pronunciation which is scheduled to be published this fall. A number of international scholars will be contributing new research highlighting the ways that Munro and Derwing's study has influenced the field.
> PSYCHOLOGY TODAY: UNDERSTANDING SOMEONE WITH A FOREIGN ACCENT
S In conjunction with International Mother Language Day, First Nations Languages Program (FNLP) postdoctoral fellow JAMES CRIPPEN shared his favourite Tlingit phrase in a video produced by the University of British Columbia (UBC) Language Sciences.
Publications and Presentations
S The fourth annual LANGUAGE SCIENCES UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH CONFERENCE (LSURC) held at the University of British Columbia saw a huge turnout from our students. For many of the students, it was their first academic conference including three students from last semester's LING 282W class.
> BIG SFU TURNOUT AT UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH CONFERENCE
S Professor MAITE TABOADA wrote a column for the Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics newsletter, arguing that corpus linguistics research has applications for social good.