The Since our last update in the Summer of 2018, the LVC lab has been quite productive. In February 2019, American Speech published “Exploring African American Language in the Nation’s Capital: Studies with the Corpus of Regional African American Language” (edited by Kendall and Farrington). This issue featured articles from members of the lab and colleagues who were given beta access to CORAAL:DC.

In May 2019, Charlie Farrington defended his dissertation, Language Variation and the Great Migration: Regionality and African American Language. In July 2019, Jason McLarty defended Prosodic Prominence Perception, Regional Background, Ethnicity and Experience: Naive Perception of African American English and European American English, just prior to starting his job at Emory University.

Charlotte Vaughn and Tyler Kendall published Stylistically coherent variants: Cognitive representation of social meaning in Revista de Estudos da Linguagem in 2019 and Exploring vowel formant estimation through simulation based techniques in Linguistics Vanguard in 2020.

In early 2020, Kaylynn Gunter published her first qualifying paper (co-authored with Charlotte Vaughn and Tyler Kendall), called Perceiving Southernness: Vowel Categories and Acoustic Cues in Southernness Ratings, in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Two books are forthcoming from members of the lab. In November 2020, African American Language Language development from Infancy to Adulthood (Mary Kohn, Walt Wolfram, Charlie Farrington, Jennifer Renn and Janneke Van Hofwegen) will be published by Cambridge University Press. This project is the culmination of several decades of a pioneering linguistic survey.

In May 2021, Sociophonetics, by Tyler Kendall and Valerie Fridland, will be published as part of Cambridge’s Key Topics in Sociolinguistics Series.

For more information, see our publications page!