Lab Members

Dr. Anne-Michelle Tessier

Lab Director

Anne-Michelle (Ph.D. 2007, UMass Amherst) is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at UBC. She is a phonologist specializing in acquisition, constraint-based grammars, learning algorithms, and child L1 and L2 production.  She previously held faculty and researcher appointments at the University of Alberta, SFU and the Center for Human Growth and Development (UMichigan). In 2015, she published a textbook “Phonological Acquisition: Child Language and Constraint-Based Grammar” (Palgrave Macmillan). Her current projects focus on modeling French liaison, in both developing and end-state grammars (with Karen Jesney, Marie-Eve Bouchard, Tania Zamuner and others); the perception and acceptability of English onset cluster repairs, among L1 child and L2 adult listeners (with Claire Moore-Cantwell and others); and the acquisition of complex, interacting phonological patterns including Canadian Raising (with Ashley Farris-Trimble).

Photo Credit: J. Craft

Howard

Howard (Basic Obedience, 2019), has been interested in language acquisition as long as he can remember, and is particularly focused on inter-species communicative development. His research emphasizes the role of IDS and extreme pitch excursions as a function of speaker, context and treat value, and the importance of head tilt, trying not to jump, and extreme tail wagging in discourse. He is also a very good boy.

Bagel

Bagel (Puppy Training Diploma, 2022) joined our lab from a Washington state group, where she focused primarily on licking things and romping. Her current interests include gently chewing socks and throwing herself at senior canine lab member Howard, but she is beginning to focus more on issues of language comprehension, lexical development, as well as loving blueberries. She is a very good girl. 

Alex Ayala

Graduate student

Alex is PhD Student of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia. She studies morphophonology and mathematical models of learnability. She is curious about how we form words and the ways in which we use abstract categories to learn that words are related through form-meaning mappings. Specifically, her projects include relational puzzles like paradigm gaps, and categorisation puzzles like sub-morphemic expressions of morphosyntactic features. She enjoys photography, playing video games, and pretending that she is being chased by zombies when she runs.

Sijia Zhang

Graduate Student

Sijia is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at UBC. Her research focuses on second language (L2) acquisition of phonology and formal modeling of L2 phonology. Her current project looks into how L1 Mandarin-speaking adults with different amounts of L2 English experiences perceive English low-vowel + nasal sequences. She is also interested in the fields of prosody and speech perception through experimental approaches and fieldwork, including Mandarin speech segmentation and tone sandhi, as well as Ktunaxa focus prosody. Outside of linguistics, you may find her running, playing basketball, or playing the piano.

Abiodun Ibikunle

Graduate Student 

Abiodun is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia, where he works on Phonetics and Phonology with a particular focus on vowel harmony systems in African languages—especially the Ukaan language family. His recent work includes research on long-distance vowel harmony in Ayanran, prosodic explanations of high tone morphology in Yoruba, and the phonological adaptation of English loanwords into Ojibwe

Katie Arnold

Graduate Student

Katie is an MA student in the UBC Department of Linguistics. She studies second language phonetics and phonology, with current research focusing on how Italian learners produce and perceive consonant length contrasts. She is also interested in minority languages of northern Italy and in how prosodic cues interact with phonological contrasts. In her free time, she enjoys knitting, playing trick-taking card games, and making/listening to music.

Julia Schillo

Graduate Student

Info coming soon…

 Kade Schneider

Maria-Elena Mishchenko

Maria-Elena is a BA student at UBC majoring in Speech Sciences and French. Currently she is working on the lab’s French Liaison project. Her linguistic interests primarily lie in bilingual language acquisition and sociolinguistics with a casual curiosity for the mystical French circumflex. In her free time she enjoys writing multilingual poetry, bouldering every dubious rock she sees and working on her sketchbook in cafés across the city.