Past Events and Presentations

• May 11 — The department awarded the first Becker Essay Prize at the Yvonne Becker Colloquium to Rebekah Wong, followed by a guest lecture from Teresa Pratt on affect and embodiment in sociolinguistics. Read and learn more about Rebekah’s essay.

• May 8-12 — Prof. Yue Wang gave an invited lecture at the Acoustical Society of America (ASA)'s 184th Meeting, held in Chicago, Illinois. Her presentation was on "Audio-visual clear speech: articulation, acoustics and perception of segments and tones", with collaborators Profs. Allard Jongman and Joan Sereno at the University of Kansas.

• May 31 to June 3 — Several students and faculty members, including Yifang Yuan, Adeola Babayode-Lawal, Michaela Bilot, Teresita Garduno, Rosemary Webb, Donna Gerdts and Nancy Hedberg, attended and presented their research at the 2023 CLA Conference.

• June 17 — PhD candidate Tasnim Abedalqader presented her paper, “The linguistic netscape of Jordan: English use in the mediated discourse of advertising” at the 25th conference of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE), which was held at Stony Brook University, New York.

Publications

• Prof. Heather Bliss, in collaboration with Naato’saaki Annette Fox-BruisedHead and their team of Blackfoot language educators and Elders, have launched Niitsipowahsin at Home: A Blackfoot Language Learning Guide for Families. Copies of the book are being distributed to students and their families in two school divisions in Lethbridge, Alberta, and a virtual version is available here. The project was sponsored by Changing Horses Not-for-Profit Society, and funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage. Learn more about the project and the team.

• Prof. Yue Wang and her team at LAB lab recently published two research papers: "Mouth2Audio: intelligible audio synthesis from videos with distinctive vowel articulation" and "Different facial cues for different speech styles in Mandarin tone articulation." PDFs are available on the LAB lab website.

• Post-doctoral fellow Andrew Cheng has been quoted in a Mashable article, “What does queer mean?”

Congratulations

• Prof. Suzanne K. Hilgendorf has been awarded a SFU/VPR Travel Grant to attend the 25th conference of the International Association for World Englishes. The gathering took place on June 15-17 at Stony Brook University in New York, where she gave a presentation entitled “Foreign Language – Lingua Franca – Additional Language: Changing Roles of English within Kachru’s Expanding Circle.”

• Prof. Donna Gerdts was awarded a SSHRC Connection Grant for the upcoming 58th International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages (ICSNL58)! The event will be held on July 27-29.

• Two members of the LAB lab have been admitted to graduate programs at UBC: Samuel To (Audiology) and Janitta Wong (SLP).