This week, I was on an invited panel at the Center for Oklahoma Studies to showcase current work on dialectal features of Oklahoma English. I talked about pre-lateral mergers (phonetics), Sara Loss talked about personal datives (syntax), Nathan Horton talked about generational perceptions of "good" English in Oklahoma, and Sara's students Madalyn Peck and Maghin Brewer talked about the RODEO project and making available the data Dennis Preston's students collected during his years at OSU. It was held in the beautiful reading room in the library, and various faculty, students, and librarians attended and asked great questions. It was a great opportunity to present work to a wider audience and put our discrete studies in a broader context. 

My department - both faculty and students - made a great showing at our state conference, the Oklahoma Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Faculty gave several talks and workshops, all 8 posters were from OSU students and faculty labs, and our students beat our rivals OU at the first annual Praxis Bowl!  Students from my lab presented two posters about our Deaf Experience, Deaf Expression (DXDX) Project: Bailey Smith and Mary Vang described the process of creating the video interview corpus with teams of students in a project-based course, and grad student Tess Meyer presented her thematic analysis of sudden situational loss of communication due to things like noisy restaurants, dead hearing aid/cochlear implant batteries, taking off devices for swimming, masks, and Zoom. I was very proud of all our students, and I'm so glad to see our state conference back to full activities and providing so many opportunities for student involvement.