Karen Jesney granted tenure at Carleton University

As of July 1 2025, long-standing lab collaborator Karen Jesney has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the School of Linguistics and Language Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is now on sabbatical for a year, which means nobody can ask her to do anything except write the paper she and Anne-Michelle […]

Upcoming Fall 2025 lab member presentations

In September, Sijia Zhang and Anne-Michelle Tessier will be presenting a poster at AMP 2025 at UC Berkeley, entitled Asymmetries in Chengdu and Northern Mandarin phonotactics: variation and its consequences. Then in October, Kaili Vesik and Anne-Michelle Tessier will be presenting a talk at the MEDAL conference — New Challenges, Novel Approaches — at the […]

Kaili Vesik successfully defends her dissertation!

On June 25, 2025 lab member Kaili Vesik defended her dissertation, Gradual Error-Driven Learning and Typology of Finnic Vowel Interactions. In addition to Anne-Michelle as supervisor, her committee consisted of Gunnar Hansson, Kathleen Currie Hall, and university examiners Molly Babel and Merje Kuus (Geography). We are so happy for her! To celebrate, there were friends […]

Gazelle Khalaji successfully completes MA thesis!

In April 2025, lab member Gazelle (Zara) Khalaji Pirlabuti successfully completed her MA thesis, entitled Learning Morpho-phonological Alternations like French Liaison. In addition to Anne-Michelle as supervisor, her committee consisted of Carla Hudson Kam and Gunnar Hansson. Her defense was impressive and her work really original! To read about the project, go to Gazelle’s website, or download […]

Child Phonology talk at 2025 LSA Annual Meeting

At the January 2025 LSA meeting in Philadelphia: Kaili Vesik presented part of her dissertation research, entitled “General-over-specific markedness bias as a balancing force in GLA-style learning” Anne-Michelle Tessier spoke as part of an organized session on Computational Models of Learnability and Acquisition of Morphology and Phonology, giving a talk entitled “What can acquisition data […]