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"

Three Phonetics/Phonology grad students traveled during summer 2018 for training and overseas linguistics fieldwork:

• Rachel Vogel (upper right & lower right picture) visited Indonesia to record the endangered rural Termanu language. Rachel performed her research under a linguistics field work and language training program funded by a grant from the NSF Documenting Endangered Language Program . Under this program, Rachel traveled with Indonesian students to remote rural villages and recorded audio conversations with local people. The experience and skills she acquired inspired Rachel to focus her PhD research on endangered languages.
• Nielson Hul (upper left picture, with fellow student Aditya Battacharjee of the University of Pennsylvania) spent eight weeks learning Thai at the Southeast Asia Summer Studies Institute in Madison, Wisconsin. Nielson attended via a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship from Cornell's Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) , and he learned Thai language and culture through classroom instruction by native speakers; visits to a Thai temple; and sampling of traditional Thai foods.
• Dan Burgdorf traveled to northern Myanmar to record Burmese and Shan dialects.