Linguistics Ph.D. Students Awarded Willson Center Graduate Research Scholarships

This week, Linguistics Ph.D. students Keiko Bridwell and Amelia Abbott received Graduate Research Awards from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts Advisory Board. The scholarships were awarded to fund Bridwell and Abbott's respective research efforts. 

Keiko Bridwell's project continues her previous research on Southern American English. Titled "Interactions of Rootedness, Politics, and Heightened Speech Awareness in Southern US English," Keiko's research delves into the sociophonetics of Southern American English. Bridwell presented earlier this month at NWAV51, this year themed "Variation in the World's Languages." Her presentation involved a perception study of the variable [hw], a primary focus of Bridwell's current research. 

Amelia Abbott's project, “Development of Grammatical Features in Heading Learners of ASL,” extends her work on language acquisition. Specifically, Abbott's research focuses on understanding M2L2 (second modality second language) acquisition, in which a language user acquires a new language in a different modality (whether spoken, signed, or haptic). Abbott has spent the last year in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is a visiting student at the University of Michigan's Sign Language and Multimodal Communication Lab. 

Both Keiko Bridwell and Amelia Abbott will present later this year at the UGA Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition in the Spring. The 3MT competition is sponsored by the UGA Graduate School every year to challenge students' effectiveness in relaying their research topic. The winner will receive $1,000, and there is an opportunity for a People's Choice prize. Previous Linguistics department winners and finalists in the 3MT competition include alumni Rachel Olsen and Shannon Rodriguez.