Abby Cohn - Professor of Linguistics & a member of the Phonetics Laboratory - is one of four Cornell faculty members who received a 2018 Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award. Quoting the Cornell Chronicle article announcing the award:

Abigail Cohn, professor in the Department of Linguistics, College of Arts and Sciences, is described by her colleagues as an “endless source of wisdom and advice.” She was cited for her warmth and altruism. A Class of 2016 graduate wrote: “The strong personal bond she fostered did not fade with graduation. Even now as I am overseas, she has continued to advise me on all facets of the graduate school application process.” Another student recalled, “In our last meeting that summer, Abby (the only professor to allow me to use her first name) wrote a personal email to my mom, thanking her for the work I had done, saying such kind words about my character that my own mother nearly came to tears.”

The Kendall S. Carpenter Advising Award recognizes the sustained and distinguished contributions of professorial faculty and senior lecturers to undergraduate advising, and nominations are solicited annually from all members of the academic community. Nominees must be active contributors to college teaching and to their scholarly field, as appropriate to their appointments, and not have previously won the award.

Naomi Enzinna successfully defended her dissertation Automatic and social effects on accommodation in monolingual and bilingual speech, where she experimentally studied accommodation by English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals from a majority monolingual community (Ithaca, NY) and a majority bilingual community (Miami, FL).

She determined that accommodation is both automatic and socially-modulated, but that socially-motivated accommodation is more persistent (i.e., longer-lasting) than accommodation that occurs due to automatic causes. This finding suggests that socially-motivated accommodation is more likely to lead to long-term accommodation and, thus, language change - such as the the unique "Miami English" dialect that inspired Naomi's studies.

Naomi is shown here with members of her thesis committee - from left to right: committee members Dr. Sam Tilsen, Dr. Abby Cohn, and Committee Chair Dr. Draga Zec. Dr. Marie Huffman of Stony Brook University - also a committee member - is not shown.

With her Cornell dissertation completed, Naomi is now a lecturer at Rice University's Program for Writing and Communication, where she will teach linguistics-inspired writing seminars.

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.