Lacey Wade

Introducing the tidynorm package! It's got convenience functions for applying your favorite vowel normalization methods to point measures, formant tracks, and DCT coefficients in a tidyverse workflow, as well as a flexible framework for defining your own normalization methods!

publishers marketplace screenshot: HOW TO NONBINARY A LANGUAGE by Kirby Conrod was sold at auction to Julia Steer at OUP by Kate McKean

HEY SO I TO GET TO SHARE THIS NOW. REALLY EXCITED

Today I told some UK collaborators that we couldn’t have “dialect diversity” or “algorithmic bias” in the title of a grant that would be reviewed by the NEH. I have never felt less free to speak or do my job than I do right now.

At least 12 universities now have hiring freezes and nearly 30 have cut PhD admissions this year

If you hear of other places you can add them to this google doc:

The Democrats on the House Science Committee have set up a website to collect stories from fired federal employees, anonymously if desired. Please amplify. (This helps the lawyers establish standing for bringing legal cases against the administration!)

democrats-science.house.gov/sciencefirings

So one of the things that I think is lost on AI proponents is what I call the card catalog effect, a thing I shouldn’t call it because a lot of people probably have no experience with a card catalog.

THE BUNNY PAPER HAS BEEN PUBLISHED!!

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

#linguistics 🐦

The notion that Trump's "I'm king" tweet is "just trolling" or "a joke" presents an opportunity to recreate my just-joking thread (porting it over from the Bad Place):

1. I wrote my PhD dissertation on the social function of humor (in literature & film) and here's the thing about "just joking."

Hey, this was my first qualifying paper! Believe me, conservatives think gender-neutral language is *literally* evil, and masculine marked role nouns are their weapon of choice

Super great that one of the major funding bodies that supports my physics research is now officially in opposition to me being the one to do it.

This goes so fucking hard dude

American science and medicine has been thrown into chaos and uncertainty over the past week. Here are some stories to get up to speed. 1/12

This week, the Linguistics Department invites you to our undergraduate Research Symposium, where some of our students are presenting original research. Lila Church is giving a talk featuring her honors thesis on storytelling in indigenous language education. /1

Me: Why did the chicken cross the road?
3-year-old: Chicken who?
Me: No you’re supposed to say “I don’t know, why?”
3: I don’t know, why?
Me: To get to the other side!
3: *laughs wildly*
3:
3: The other side who?

#AllJokesAreKnockKnockJokesWhenYoure3

Dear students. Your professors have meals with, hang out with, share social media with, and drink with, the people you are citing. If the LLM you used says something off the wall, I will hunt it down because I'm going to go, "That person doesn't think that; we talked about it over manhattans!"

The way I felt seeing this is also how I feel when my students turn in AI responses and then are flabbergasted that I can tell.

KU Linguistics was represented at NWAV 52 in Miami this weekend by Prof. Lacey Wade (center) and 4th year student Tyler Hausthor (right), who gave a talk entitled, "What makes a speaker sound Kansan?" 🌻 They also caught up with KU Linguistics BA alum Griffin Lowry (left)!

PLC 48 will take place on March 16–17 in Philadelphia with keynote speaker Vera Gribanova, panelists Dan Swingley, Jane Chandless, and Micha Elsner, and moderator Charles Yang

Abstracts for the 48th Penn Linguistics Conference are due Nov 17!

PLC is run by Penn Ling grad students and we welcome a wide variety of submissions from faculty, students (graduate and undergraduate), and independent researchers.

More details here: www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC/p...

Dialect experience modulates cue reliance in sociolinguistic convergence Author(s): Wade, Lacey R; Embick, David; Tamminga, Meredith | Abstract: Expectation-driven convergence occurs when speakers shift their speech to approximate the language they expect rather than obser...

escholarship.org/uc/item/2h31...

Dialect experience modulates cue reliance in sociolinguistic convergence Author(s): Wade, Lacey R; Embick, David; Tamminga, Meredith | Abstract: Expectation-driven convergence occurs when speakers shift their speech to approximate the language they expect rather than obser...

Ooh, thanks for catching this. Copy-paste fail. Link here doi.org/10.5070/G601...

Cool bonus finding that lower frequency items show more convergence (even though ppl aren’t actually hearing the words—or even vowel—they are imitating). Implications for the mechanism behind frequency effects in convergence more generally?

Non-Southerners converge toward monophthongal /ay/ if they are simply *told* they are listening to a southerner (even if they aren’t!)

Southerners converge toward monophthongal /ay/ (a feature of Southern US speech) when they hear *other* southern-accented features, even if they think the speaker is from somewhere else—like Ohio!

escholarship.org/uc/item/2h3118…
New paper out in @glossapsycholx.bsky.social w/ Dave Embick and Meredith Tamminga showing that experience with a given dialect modulates which cues participants use when converging toward a speaker of that dialect.

Mug with three birds and three IPA flap symbols turned upside so it reads “JJJ” with upside down birds.

My favorite mug is my “JJJ” mug because every time I use it I think about the person printing the mug designs taking the initiative to turn the design upside down because “JJJ” with upside down birds obvs makes more sense than the alternative.