Two successful talks at LASSO

Two students from my lab and I delivered talks at the Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO) conference, held virtually this September. Molly Landers and I talked about pre-lateral mergers in Oklahoma, where words like pole and pull sound alike, and cull sounds like coal or cool. Molly has been measuring and plotting these vowels all year, and she's planning a follow-up study for her master's thesis. Zoe Haddad, now a second-year master's student, revisited her senior honors thesis about employer's attitudes toward Southern vowel features.  Both talks went very smoothly, and the online format allowed us to share our work at a time of the semester when it's hard for grad students to get away to travel.