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Our own Jupitara Ray is presenting a poster (co-authored with Prof. Chang) at this week’s 50th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 50)! The title of their presentation, scheduled for the Friday afternoon poster session, is “L2 influence, L1 resilience: Change and stability in early bilingual speakers of Indian English”.
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Prof. Chang will be representing the lab at the upcoming Interspeech 2026 conference in Sydney!
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Congratulations to Jupitara Ray on successfully defending her dissertation, “Phonetic plasticity in Indian English bilinguals: How L2 accommodation alters L1 production and perception”!
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Lab alum Dr. Felix Kpogo and Prof. Chang just published a new open-access article entitled “Age, gender, and locality effects on innovation in the Twi vowel harmony system” in Language Variation and Change!
Abstract: In this study, we explored social predictors of an ongoing sound change in the Twi Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) harmony system by acoustically examining production variation in a sample of 105 speakers representing urban and traditional localities in Ghana. In the urban locality, the change was evident in all age groups and near completion in the youngest generation. In the traditional locality, by contrast, the change was evident only in some younger speakers. The effect of gender differed between localities: urban men were more advanced in the change than urban women, whereas traditional speakers showing the change were predominantly women. By reflecting the gender dynamics of societal engagement and contact in Ghana, these findings highlight the importance of local social context for the manifestation of variation and the unique insights of non-Western communities for sociolinguistic theory.
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Congratulations to Prof. Chang on being awarded the Yuen Ren Chao Prize in Language Science (Early Career Contribution Award) by the Faculty of Humanities of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU)! The Chao Prize is “an international award that honours scholars and researchers who have made distinguished contributions to language science”.
