Manchester Postgrads rack up prizes

The Spring has been a busy and successful conference time for the Manchester linguistics postgrads:

• Stephen Nichols travelled all the way to East Lansing, MI for the 49th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 49) to give a paper on ‘Accounting for Height Harmony in Five-vowel Bantu Languages’ .
• George Bailey attended the 8th Northern Englishes Workshop in Newcastle, where he received the best student talk prize for ‘Creeping above the social radar: evaluation of post-nasal [ɡ] in the North West of England’.
• George also presented joint work with Stephen Nichols (’Retraction on Coronation [ʃ]treet: An ultrasound-tongue-imaging study of s-retraction in Manchester English’) at the same conference.
• The next instalment of the Manchester /s/-project, ‘Gradience and categoricity in s-retraction: An ultrasound study of Manchester English’ received the Eugénie Henderson price for the best poster at BAAP (British Association of Academic Phoneticians) Colloquium 2018, awarded to Stephen Nichols (for a summary, see this abstract). Stephen and George join a venerable lineage of Mancunians winning this award. It was won in 2012 by Michael Ramsammy (now at University of Edinburgh), and in 2014 by both Míša Hejna (now at Aarhus University) and by Danielle Turton (now at Newcastle University).
• George and Stephen were also joined by a s(h)trong Manchester contingent at this year’s BAAP (see programme here). Stefano Coretta presented a talk ‘Tongue root advancement and vowel duration: a gradient effect?’, and colleague Patrycja Strycharczuk gave a talk titled ‘Beyond the midsagittal plane. Lateral and labial reflections of /l/-vocalisation’ (joint work with Donald Derrick and Jason Shaw).
• Finally, there were a number of Manchester poster presenters at BAAP:
  • Max Canzi: ‘A quantitative analysis of intra- and inter-speaker variation of F0, F1, F2, speech rate and vowel duration from soft to loud speech in Italian’
  • Sarah Mahmood: ‘Variation in articulation causing instability in the phonetic realisation of syllable structure’
  • Kaiyue Xing: ‘Dynamics of /r/-colouring: Perspectives from L2 acquisition’.

 

Photo: The Mancunians at BAAP2018: Patrycja Strycharczuk, Stephen Nichols, George Bailey, Max Canzi, Stefano Coretta, Kayue Xing, and Sarah Mahmood.

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