This page lists ongoing projects in which I am involved. For a list of past work, please click here.
Christina Higgins and I are interested in Pidgin speakers' judgments of Pidgin sentences and how Pidgin speakers negotiate their opinions with other Pidgin speakers. Interested in taking part? For more information on how to get involved, check out the description of our project on Pidgin and Stance in Hawai‘i.
This project looks at variation and change in Pidgin and English (and other languages) that are found in Hawai‘i. We are currently conducting interviews with people from Hawai‘i. Interested? Please contact us to take part in the Language Variation and Change in Hawai‘i Project.
SOLIS is a resource for UH Mānoa students, faculty, and visitors who work with spoken corpus data. It is home to spontaneous speech corpora for a growing number of languages. (SOLIS currently contains interview data in Korean, Hawaiian, Khmer, Hungarian, Indonesian, Pidgin, Spanish, and English.)
SOLIS is not an archive; the interviews are transcribed and time-aligned, and then uploaded using LaBB-CAT, which makes the data easily searchable and analyzable for everything from an undergraduate research project to a large-scale research program.
This resource has been created with much-appreciated help from Robert Fromont and Kurt Brunner, along with the researchers who have contributed their data and the speakers who have been willing to share their language and stories. Because SOLIS is still in its infancy (and helping it grow requires a lot of work!), I ask all researchers who wish to use this resource to please consider contributing spontaneous speech data they have collected and transcribed using the SOLIS conventions.
Sometimes the research questions I'm interested in require more control over the data than what's found in conversations and interviews. To address these questions, I conduct production and perception experiments - often in collaboration with a whole bunch of other people.
At the moment, I'm recruiting participants to take part in a speech perception experiment that looks at word identification. Specifically, it's designed to address the question: what kinds of factors influence how someone hears a word?
This experiment can be done online - all you need is a good internet connection and a pair of headphones. People from all countries and language backgrounds are welcome to participate, but only people who are 18 years old or older may take part. You do not have to be a student to take part, but this experiment can be used to fulfill the Linguistics Beyond the CLassroom (LBC) requirement for students enrolled in Linguistics courses at UHM. Interested in taking part? Click on the link to find out more about the ongoing Online Word Identification Experiment. If you want to take part, please email me and I can send you the link.
Along with Christina Higgins, I am Co-Director of the Sato Center for Pidgin, Creole, and Dialect Studies. We have research opportunities available for interested undergraduate and graduate students. Successful applicants can receive 400-level or 600-level course credit for conducting research as a part of our team. Students who speak Pidgin and/or are pursuing an Undergraduate Certificate in Pidgin and Creole Studies are especially welcome to apply. Please email me for details.
I am the convener for the In-Group, a group of made up of faculty and students who work in a variety of areas within sociolinguistics. If you are in Hawai‘i and would like to join us, please do not hesitate to contact me.
