News
Margot Cobat Defends MA Research Project
Congratulations! Margot Cobat successfully defended her MA research project on December 11th, 2025. The topic of her research was “When ‘and’ and ‘but’ aren’t enough: How L1 English Learners Interpret the Russian conjunctions ‘i’, ‘a’, and ‘no’.” Margot’s advisor is Dr. Alison Gabriele and Drs. Andrew McKenzie and Steve...
Ph.D. Student Xuan Wang receives dissertation award
Congratulations! Ph.D. student Xuan Wang was awarded a dissertation grant from the journal Language Learning for his project "Examining the role of individual differences and syntactic constraints in the processing of reflexives in L1 and L2 English: An ERP investigation." Xuan is working with Robert Fiorentino and Alison Gabriele. ...
Corey McCulloch Defends PhD Dissertation
Congratulations! Corey McCulloch successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on October 2nd, 2025. His dissertation was titled “Stressing the Suprasegmentals: L2 phonetic training of Spanish stress” and his advisor was Dr. Allard Jongman. ...
Summer Undergraduate Research Award winner, Natalia Lopez-Rios
Natalia Lopez-Rios, an undergraduate major, has won an Undergraduate Research Award (https://curf.ku.edu/undergraduate-research-awards) for Summer, 2025. She is working on a project regarding how preschool children speaking both English and Spanish may comprehend meaning of sentences with a quantifier, under my supervision. She will also write a thesis based on this...
Linguistics Graduate Student, Peace Benson on podcast about Dza Research
Linguistics Ph.D. graduate student, Peace Benson was on a podcast to talk about her research with Dza. To listen to the postcast, it can be found on Spotify. ...
Two Linguistics Undergraduate Majors Receive Awards from KU Libraries
Oliver Grotegut, a senior in linguistics and sociology from Shawnee, received a DASEE award for his work in Cataloging and Archival Processing. Grotegut’s innovation in creating new spreadsheet tools and revitalizing workflows has enriched library processes, and his descriptions are used daily by library patrons to access campus records. In...
Jocelyn Brown Defended her MA Proposal
Jocelyn Brown defended her MA proposal with honors on May 5, 2025. The title of her proposal was "Exploring Social Salience of Vernacular English Constructions in L1 and L2 Speakers". Professor Lacey Wade was her advisor. ...
Allison Monteleone - Undergraduate Research Award and presenting at Undergraduate Research Symposium
Prof. Utako Minai's undergraduate advisee/RA in my lab, Allison Monteleone, has been selected to deliver one of the 3 ACE (Accessible, Creative & Engaging) talks at the Undergraduate Research Symposium on Friday, April 25th, 4:30-5:30pm at Gray-Little Hall, Room 1146. She is not a Linguistics major but has been in...
Graduate Student, Munir Ozturhan receives 2025 Summer Research Scholarship
Münir Özturhan, one of the Linguistic graduate students was selected to be a recipient of the 2025 Summer Research Scholarship. This award of $6,000 will support Münir conduct research during the summer. Congratulations on the award, Münir! ...
Prof. Allard Jongman and Corey McCulloch receive NSF Disssertation Grant
Allard Jongman and Corey McCulloch (Linguistics) received a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). His dissertation title is "Developing phonetic training for improving the learning of second language stress." For more information, please see NSF link. ...
Undergraduate Research Awards (UGRA) for Spring 2025
The Undergraduate Research Award (UGRA) were announced by the Center for Undergraduate Research & Fellowships. UGRA recipients are awarded a $1,000 scholarship as they work on mentored research and creative projects. Congratulations to Allison Bell and Allison Monteleone. ...
Congratulations Linguistic Ph.D. Graduates from Spring & Summer 2024
Congratulations to our Linguistics Ph.D. Graduates from Spring and Summer 2024! ...
Graduate Student, Morgan Robertson awarded Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF)
Kelly Bellmyer, Linguistics Office Manager is awarded the College Staff Excellence Award, "Best of the Bunch"
The Linguistics Department Office Manager, Kelly Bellmyer won the "Best of the Bunch" College Staff Excellence Award in recognition of her service and dedication to the department and to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. ...
Linguistics Student, Daphne Tibberts wins Student Employee of Year Award
One of our Linguistics students, Daphne Tibberts wins Student Employee of Year Award. For more information, please click to see the news article in KU Today. Daphne Tibbetts is honored at the 2024 Student Employee of the Year ceremony April 10. Congratulations, Daphne! ...
Professor John Gluckman receives promotion with tenure!
The Department of Linguistics congratulates Dr. John Gluckman for his promotion to Associate Professor with tenure. We’re proud of John’s accomplishments and wish him a long and productive career at KU! ...
Professor Alison Gabriele wins Kemper Award
Professor Phil Duncan presenting at Red Hot Research
Professor Phil Duncan will be presenting at this Friday's Red Hot Research! The title of his presentation is "Language Ideology and the Dilution of Black Student Voices through 'Proper Grammar'". This session is presented in conjunction with the Office of Research and will feature an outstanding set of...
Professor Lacey Wade indicates that "stereotypes about Southern speech trump experience"
An article about Lacey Wade, Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department appeared in KU Today. The study she is working on relates to behavioral mimicry and stereotypes held about Southern accents. Wade focuses on expectation-driven convergence. Research participants shift their speech to what they think a southern accent should...
Aron Finholt, Ph.D. Student at KU accepts post-doctoral position at University of Potsdam, Germany
Aron Finholt, Ph.D. candidate in the Linguistics Department has accepted a postdoctoral position at the University of Potsdam in Germany under Dr. Doreen Georgi. His position is for 6 years and he will be working on morphosyntactic variation. He will begin teaching there in January 2024, but plans to...
Tyler Heston, affiliated Adjunct Researcher in the Linguistics Department publishes paper
Tyler Heston, affiliated Adjunct Researcher in the Linguistics Department published a paper in Language Documentation and Description 23(1): 3, 1-17. This article is in their 'Language Contexts' series, which provides background information about the historical, geographic, and cultureal context of understudied languages. ...
Henry Pratt, graduate student receives NSF grant
The Linguistics Department would like to congratulate our graduate student, Henry Pratt. He received an NSF dissertation award on investigating how vowel sounds are processed and the role they play in speech comprehension. Great job, Henry! ...
Phil Duncan wins Budig Teaching Award
Dr. Phil Duncan just won the 2023-2024 Gene Budig Teaching Professor in Social and Behavioral Sciences Award! This is a well-deserved honor that recognizes Dr. Duncan’s fantastic contributions to teaching innovation, student advising, and curriculum development in the Linguistics Department. We have all learned from Dr. Duncan’s teaching expertise. ...
Dr. Phil Duncan Promoted to Associate Teaching Professor
The Department would like to congratulate Dr. Phil Duncan as he was promoted to Associate Teaching Professor. Thank you for your hard work and dedication! ...
Linguistics Mourn Loss of MA student, Atheer Alqahtani
With heavy hearts, we mourn the loss of MA student in Linguistics Atheer Alqahtani, who tragically passed way in an accident at Glacier National Park on May 22, 2023. We will miss Atheer’s inquisitive mind, her dedication to her research and studies, her positive energy, and her kindness. She will...
Phil Duncan Co-Author of Book on Endangered African Language, Ikpana
Phil Duncan expanded his documentation of the Ikpana, an endangered African language with his co-authored book called "Ikpana Interrogatives. For more information, check out the KU Today News article. ...
2023 Award Winners
Pictures are available on the Linguistics Awards website page. ...
Graduate Student Amaya Madden presented at 30th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference
Amaya Madden, a graduate student presented at the 30th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference (March 11-13, 2023, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada). This presentation is titled “Acquisition of Japanese negative polarity item licensing by English-speaking second language learners”, co-authored by her and Professor Utako Minai. ...
Ayumi Nobuki, a Linguistics graduate student presented at Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) 2023 Biennial Meeting
Ayumi Nobuki, a graduate student presented her poster at the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) 2023 Biennial Meeting (March 23-25, 2023, Salt Lake City, Utah). The title of her presentation is “Pragmatic judgement of negative sentences by children: A case of child Japanese”, co-authored by her, Megumi Ishikawa...
Linguistic Graduate Students Presented at ASA Meeting on December 5-9, 2022
Linguistic graduate students presented at the 183rd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Nashville, TN, on December 5~9, 2022. Hyoju Kim presented "Perceptual Training Enhances Seoul Korean Listeners’ Use of Vowel Quality and Pitch Cues to English Lexical Stress" with Dr. Annie Tremblay (University of Texas at...