ACAL in SoCAL: Selected papers from the 53rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics

Yaqian Huang received her PhD in Linguistics and Cognitive Science from the University of California San Diego, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Acoustics Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She previously taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. She works on phonetics, laboratory phonology, and the cognitive processes underlying speech perception and production, with a focus on voice quality, tone, and vowel quality.

Jun Jie (JJ) Lim is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of California San Diego. His research interests include syntax, fieldwork, language contact, and language variation and change. His research is informed by data from the Corpus of Singapore English Messages, which he helped co-create and compile, and his fieldwork on two Mongolic varieties, Khalkha Mongolian and Kalmyk Oirat.

Sharon Rose is Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of California San Diego. Her research investigates the phonology of African languages, with a focus on Semitic languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, Heiban languages of Sudan and Kwa languages of Ghana. She has researched long distance consonant and vowel harmony, dissimilation, tone, and intonation. She is currently working on Moro, Tira and Rere, three Heiban languages of Sudan.

Anthony Struthers-Young is a PhD Candidate in Linguistics at the University of California San Diego. He is interested in language documentation, prosody, and the intersection of music and language, with a particular focus on musical surrogate languages and grammatical tone. Much of his research has been done with the Toussian people of southwest Burkina Faso, studying both the spoken Toussian languages, as well as their xylophone musical surrogate languages.

Nina Hagen Kaldhol is a PhD Candidate in Linguistics at the University of California San Diego. Her research interests include phonology and morphology, with a special interest in the role of tone in the organization of morphological systems. In collaboration with native speakers of Tira, Rere and Somali, she works on language documentation while also aiming to advance our theoretical understanding of tone and morphological complexity.