Phonetics Lab member Nielson Hul has accepted a faculty position at the University of Washington at Seattle, in the Department of Asian Languages & Literature.

Nielson - a PhD candidate in Phonetics - will be the program head for the university's Khmer Language Program, and will teach all three levels of Khmer - beginning, intermediate, and advanced.    

Nielson accepted this position because of his enthusiasm for Khmer language education, and the fact that Seattle has the third-largest Cambodian population in the United States.  This community's presence will greatly aid Nielson's ongoing research on how English has affected Khmer language in the diaspora.

Nielson plans to complete his dissertation this fall, then will move his family to Seattle in December & start his new position in January, 2025.   We are sorry to see Nielson depart, but we are also happy that he's found a position doing the teaching and research that he loves.

The Phonetics Lab welcomes  Fulbright Scholar Leonardo Teixeira (pronounced tay-shay-dah), who will be spending the nine months of his Fulbright term here in the Lab as a visiting research student.

Leonardo is a Brazilian PhD Linguistics student at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), an institution known for its strong research programs and academic excellence,  located in the northeastern Brazilian state of Ceará. He is among the 30 Brazilian scholars awarded the Fulbright Doctoral Dissertation Research Award (DDRA) to conduct research in the United States this year.

Leonardo came to Cornell because the Linguistics Department is a center of linguistics excellence in terms of its faculty and technology resources.  He hopes to apply those resources to developing a doctoral research proposal focused on how prosody develops in L2 speakers.  As part of this effort, Leonardo will work with Dr. Sam Tilsen on developing methods for describing, analyzing, and modeling L2 prosody changes. 

Leonardo came to Linguistics through his lifelong fascination with how language underpins our interaction with the world, and how language acts as an interface between us, others, and reality.  In addition to his interest in linguistics and phonetics, he also teaches Languages (English & Brazilian Portuguese)  at the Federal Institute of Education, Science, and Technology of Ceará (IFCE), an academic institution recognized for its comprehensive educational programs and research initiatives.

On May 24, 2024,  Phonetics Lab alumnus Dr. Linda Heimisdottir (PhD 2015) gave a TEDx Reykjavik lecture titled "Will AI be able to speak your language"?

In this talk, Linda discusses whether linguistic diversity will survive the AI (Artificial Intelligence) revolution.  Quoting Linda:

"My concern is that the rise of artificial intelligence in the field of language technology will accelerate the digital death of small languages. What I mean by digital death, by the way, is that the native speakers of a language stop using it all together in the digital domain, for whatever reason, but usually it's because it's just not as convenient as using a more dominant language like English. And with the virtual domain occupying more and more of our time, and our children's time. well then, the digital death of a language can actually threaten its very existence."

Despite this worrisome possibility, Linda also presented ways to effectively incorporate small languages into Large Language Models via language-specific real-time transcription apps and  Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning.  

Linda is 2015 Cornell Linguistics PhD, and is currently the CEO of Miðeind, an Icelandic AI company which specializes in building Language Technology solutions for Icelandic and other under-resourced languages

First-year Linguistics grad student Annabelle di Lustro recently participated in the KAKEHASHI Project, an exchange program for young American researchers to visit Japan,  sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (MOFA).   (This picture of Annabelle was taken at 大内宿 (Ōuchi-juku) - a very old rural town in the mountains of Fukushima prefecture.)

 
 “Kakehashi” means a “bridge” in Japanese, and the program serves to act as a bridge between the cultures of the US and Japan.  MOFA commissioned the Japan International Cooperation Center (JICE) to organize the program,  which 
 included graduate students from Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, and George Washington University. 

 
During her eight days in Japan, Annabelle participated in various cultural experiences such as:

    -Traditional  Japanese dyeing in Tokyo

    -A brief stay with a host family in Minamiaizu

    -Lectures at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the University of Aizu,

    -A talk by Professor Watanabe Yasushi at Keio University, Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) on the international politics of Japan and soft power

Annabelle - who majored in Japanese and Linguistics as an undergraduate at North Carolina State University - also learned more about Japanese history and culture through a trip to the Tokyo National Museum , and a visit to  Panasonic introduced her to Japanese modern technology and innovation.  

Reflecting on her trip, Annabelle believes that her experiences have affected her research goals.  In her words:

"I think the homestay in particular influenced my relationship with Japanese and my future studies. When my host father was explaining a concept or festival I'd never heard of, he would use text to speech to show me the kanji and translation. It usually took him a few tries, though, before the AI was able to pick up what he was saying due to his dialect.

"I have always been interested in dialectology (I attended undergrad in North Carolina aka "Dialect Heaven"), but this experience definitely furthered my desire to pursue dialectology in the realm of Japanese language and not just American English."