Naomi Enzinna successfully defended her dissertation Automatic and social effects on accommodation in monolingual and bilingual speech, where she experimentally studied accommodation by English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals from a majority monolingual community (Ithaca, NY) and a majority bilingual community (Miami, FL).

She determined that accommodation is both automatic and socially-modulated, but that socially-motivated accommodation is more persistent (i.e., longer-lasting) than accommodation that occurs due to automatic causes. This finding suggests that socially-motivated accommodation is more likely to lead to long-term accommodation and, thus, language change - such as the the unique "Miami English" dialect that inspired Naomi's studies.

Naomi is shown here with members of her thesis committee - from left to right: committee members Dr. Sam Tilsen, Dr. Abby Cohn, and Committee Chair Dr. Draga Zec. Dr. Marie Huffman of Stony Brook University - also a committee member - is not shown.

With her Cornell dissertation completed, Naomi is now a lecturer at Rice University's Program for Writing and Communication, where she will teach linguistics-inspired writing seminars.

Christina Bjorndahl successfully defended her dissertation A Story of /v/: Voiced Spirants in the Obstruent-Sonorant Divide. Christina studied the class of voiced spirants (the voiced, non-sibilant fricatives), with a special focus on [v], and specifically looked at how [v] and the remaining voiced spirants patterned phonetically, phonologically, and in terms of their distribution to consonant inventories with respect to the obstruent-sonorant divide. Christina's thesis committee consisted of Abby Cohn, Mats Rooth, and Committee Chair Draga Zec.

Having completed her studies at Cornell, Christina is now a Special Faculty member in Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Philosophy.

Ferdinand "Okki" Kurniawan successfully defended his dissertation
"Phonological variation in Jakarta Indonesian: an emerging variety of Indonesian".

Okki is shown here with members of his thesis committee - from left to right: committee members Dr. John Wolff and Dr. Draga Zec, Okki Kurniawan, and committee Chair Dr. Abby Cohn.

Phonetics/Phonology researchers and graduate students were well traveled this Spring, with appearances in Taiwan and in England:

• Grad students Dan Burgdorf and Sireemas Maspong traveled to Taiwan to present papers at the the 28th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, which was held May 17-24, 2018 at Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
• The Phonetics lab was also well-represented at this year's Manchester Phonology Meeting, held May 24-26, 2018 in the city of Manchester, UK. Dr. Draga Zec gave a talk on "Loanword specific prosody as minimal constraint re-ranking", and the following three grad students presented posters on their research:
  • Rachel Vogel - "Maintenance of voicing and aspiration contrasts in Nepali stops"
  • Dan Burgdorf - "Productivity of minor syllables in Burmese"
  • Brynhildur Stefansdottir - "Approximant reduction in colloquial Icelandic"