EPSCoR Research Fellows: NSF: Documenting Language Change and Emerging Varieties among Non-Native Speaking Communities

This Research Infrastructure Improvement EPSCoR Research Fellows project provides a fellowship to an Associate professor and training for a graduate student at the University of Mississippi. This work is conducted in collaboration with Dr. Nicholas Henriksen at the University of Michigan. Through the fellowship, the PI will analyze how bilingual speakers influence linguistic change. The fellowship will enable the PI to learn state-of-the-art methods in language documentation, computational linguistics, and digital archiving. These new analytical techniques will allow the PI to conduct research and build digital platforms that provide researchers, educators and the public a better understanding of less commonly studied language varieties and bilingual communities. Through this project, the PI will advance our scientific understanding of how language acquisition occurs in distinct social environments, ultimately adding to new theories of second language acquisition and training methods for teaching a second language. The PI will examine phonetic variation across different language communities, with bilingual speakers who learned the dominant language naturalistically. Specifically, the project investigates socio-phonetic variation of consonants from the PI’s corpus of small linguistic communities speaking patterns of a dominant language. This unique analysis of the dominant language’s phonetic variation includes speech samples from bilinguals living in three distinct, small language communities, to test the extent to which the substrate languages have influenced the resulting dominant language of adults who learned this language naturalistically. The PI will advance student training in the fields of artificial intelligence and translational research through this award via the computational and data analysis techniques on natural language learning which are applicable in these rapidly-expanding areas of study and industry. This project aligns with the Mississippi Research Consortium’s mission to support education and extend technology development in the state. This project is supported by the EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Program: EPSCoR Research Fellows, which supports early- and mid-career investigators in eligible jurisdictions to develop collaborations at the nation’s private, government or academic research institutions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.