A new researcher Dr. Lisa Sullivan, currently a postdoc at the University of Manitoba, will be joining my lab this fall!  She will be supported by a Canadian fellowship for two years to work on a project about prevelar raising/merger (pronouncing words like bag and leg more like vague). The project would extend her dissertation work -- and my own "bag-beg-bagel" prevelar merger studies -- to map the phenomenon across North America, collect massive numbers of audio recordings and perceptions online, and provide public education about dialect differences and linguistic discrimination, all in one interactive website or app. Lisa has a background in web development and experience incorporating writing practice into curriculum development, as well as her degrees in linguistics. We'll be lucky to have her!

In anticipation of a big project expansion, I gave an overview of prevelar mergers at the Friends of Oklahoma Language Studies (FOOLS) group on campus. This has been a long-standing sociophonetic project that I hope to revive with new data soon. I haven't presented on it at OSU, so it was great to nerd out about one of my favorite topics with new linguists -- for over an hour!