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Alexandra Pfiffner

@ampfiffner.bsky.social
409 followers 252 following 21 posts

Assistant Prof of Linguistics @ UGA

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Alexandra Pfiffner @ampfiffner.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Super excited to see this work with @baichendu.bsky.social in print! We did an audiovisual production experiment with native speakers of Mandarin, focusing on the co-variance of lip gestures and acoustic cues. 🎥🎤👄
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Alexandra Pfiffner @ampfiffner.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
I’ve been sitting on some big news for a while. Time to share. :) After four amazing years as a lecturer at UC Berkeley, I’m now a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia. I am beyond excited for this next chapter!
A stone wall with grey letters saying "UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA". The wall is surrounded by greenery and red flowers.
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Gretchen McCulloch @gretchenmcculloch.com · 27/06/2026
Someone suggested today at @labphon.bsky.social that academic posters need a QR code going to an email signup for "please send me the official version of this paper once it's done and citable" And all I could say was YES PLEASE CAN I HELP TWEET THIS INTO EXISTENCE
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Julie A. Hochgesang @jahochcam.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Pleased to share that “ASL Signbank” through Cambridge Elements (Sign Language Series) is out! It’s free for the next two weeks. You can find it here doi.org/10.1017/9781... Thanks to Erin Wilkinson and David Quinto-Pozos, editors of Sign Language Series, for their support! #ASLSignbank
Book cover - multicolor pixel-like shapes across the page with text "Cambridge Elements Sign Language" on top, "ASL Signbank" centered and "Julie A. Hochgesang" bottom
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Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri) @adamcschembri.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Our new book on sign language linguistics (adapted from the 2007 Auslan linguistics book) isn't out until next month, but over 500 clips of BSL and ASL sign examples from the book can be downloaded now! Take a look at the resources section on the book's webpage. www.cambridge.org/highereducat...
cambridge.org
Sign Language Linguistics | Cambridge Aspire website
Discover Sign Language Linguistics, 1st Edition, Adam Schembri, HB ISBN: 9781107077140 on Cambridge Aspire website
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Jen Hay @jbhay.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Published today. The vowel in 'just' is undergoing an independent sound change, separate from any changes to KIT or STRUT. Filed under the ever-growing category of "things that were supposed to be fun little papers, that unexpectedly ended up taking many years" www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...
degruyterbrill.com
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Alexandra Pfiffner @ampfiffner.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
New place of articulation just dropped
A screenshot of an ebook with the words “naso-labial” highlighted.
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Joey Stanley @joeystanley.com · 16/03/2026
‼️🔔 My paper, "Hypercorrect Moun[tʰɨn] in Utah English", has now been published in English World-Wide. 🎉🥳🎊 tl;dr: Utahns say [tʰ] in words like "mountain" more than people in other regions. www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...
jbe-platform.com
Hypercorrect Moun[thɨn] in Utah English
Abstract This study analyzes unstressed /tən/ in words like button, kitten, and mountain. In Utah, there are three variants: North American mainstream [ʔn̩], forticized [thɨn], and local [ʔɨn]. While ...
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Alexandra Pfiffner @ampfiffner.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
Super excited to share that my Afrikaans paper has been published! Following in the footsteps of Coetzee et al. (2018), I examine age and gender effects in the ongoing tonogenesis in Afrikaans. 📖 Open access here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
Women of All Ages Lead Tonogenesis in Afrikaans | Journal of Germanic Linguistics | Cambridge Core
Women of All Ages Lead Tonogenesis in Afrikaans - Volume 37 Issue 3
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 07/03/2025
This is actually the worst thing I’ve seen from federal granting agencies thus far.
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Alexandra Pfiffner @ampfiffner.bsky.social · 18/01/2025
I genuinely don't know how this started, but I absolutely love it 🐈‍⬛
A screenshot of an email from an unidentified student. The text says, "additionally, i heard through the grapevine that students are sending you cat photos, so also attached are some from me."
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Lingthusiasm @lingthusiasm.com · 17/01/2025
After we released this bonus episode, very talented listener Melody sent us these photos of her own crocheted model of the vocal tract! She kindly gave us permission to share them publicly. If you too have a crocheted vocal tract that you've made, please send us pictures, we'd love to see more!
Photo of a crocheted vocal tract using multiple coloured yarns, constructed around a plastic water bottle and held up using straws.Photo of a crocheted vocal tract using multiple coloured yarns, constructed around a plastic water bottle and held up using straws.Photo of a crocheted vocal tract using multiple coloured yarns, constructed around a plastic water bottle and held up using straws.Photo of a crocheted vocal tract using multiple coloured yarns, constructed around a plastic water bottle and held up using straws.
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Alexandra Pfiffner @ampfiffner.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
It’s fun to catch up with friends at #LSA2025 & #ADS2025, and WOTY is always a highlight. But nothing will beat @mkb933.bsky.social GIVING A TALK ON SOMEONE ELSE’S BEHALF (not a coauthor!), on short notice, while chairing the session, and then taking questions to pass on to authors. Legendary.
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Ben Zimmer @benzimmer.bsky.social · 12/01/2025
Proud to be a linguistic chaos gremlin.
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Andrea @teachbk.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
Increased reliance on ChatGPT was associated with higher levels of procrastination and memory loss, and a negative impact on academic performance, as reflected in students’ grade point averages.” www.psypost.org/chatgpt-link...
psypost.org
ChatGPT linked to declining academic performance and memory loss in new study
New research uncovers a concerning trend: while ChatGPT might aid students under academic pressure, its excessive use is linked to procrastination, memory loss, and poorer grades, highlighting a negat...
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American Dialect Society @americandialect.org · 11/01/2025
"Rawdog" is the 2024 American Dialect Society word of the year. Read the full press release. #WOTY2024 #ADS2025 #LSA2025 americandialect.org/2024-word-of...
americandialect.org
2024 Word of the Year Is “Rawdog” - American Dialect Society
Philadelphia Marriott Downtown–Jan. 10—The American Dialect Society, in its 35th annual words-of-the-year vote, selected rawdog as the Word of the Year for 2024. More than three hundred attendees took...
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Josef Fruehwald @jofrhwld.bsky.social · 24/12/2024
A lovely obituary for Bill Labov in the Inquirer.
inquirer.com
William Labov, ‘father of sociolinguistics’ who studied the Philadelphia accent, dies at 97
William Labov's work changed whose dialects linguists saw worthy of study and dove into the socioeconomic politics of language. He is considered the father of sociolinguistics.
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Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri) @adamcschembri.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
Vale William Labov. Inspired by a colleague on X, I think my favourite Bill Labov quote is: “I have resisted the term *sociolinguistics* for many years, since it implies that there can be a successful linguistic theory or practice which is not social.” Thank you for everything, Bill.
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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 16/12/2024
Phase Transition xkcd.com/3025
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Emily Myers @emilymyers.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
Just did a calculation of our lab's time from project conception to publication (e-pub) over the past x years. We're averaging 3.5 years from the first idea to acceptance. About 6-9 months of this is review time. Don't know how typical this is but good reality check esp. for trainees.
Histogram showing time to publication of papers in years; distribution centers on about 3/5 years
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Alexandra Pfiffner @ampfiffner.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
A student just gave me the best gift and I will treasure it forever 😭🤍
A shiny and new white coffee mug sits on an ocean blue desk mat. The mug has black writing on it that says, “Ain’t no party like a fricative party ‘cuz a fricative party don’t stop.” There is also a beautiful floral embellishment on the mug with shades of pink, green, blue, and yellow.
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The Layman's Linguist @laymanslinguist.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
The official motto of experimental linguists anyone?
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Aleksandra Ćwiek @acwiek.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
I'm excited to share our new study on cross-modal iconicity from our special issue in JASA! We show [r] is rough and [l] is smooth even in languages that conflate them within one phoneme. The effect is even stronger than the bouba/kiki effect!
doi.org
The alveolar trill is perceived as jagged/rough by speakers of different languages
Typological research shows that across languages, trilled [r] sounds are more common in adjectives describing rough as opposed to smooth surfaces. In this study
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Weverthon Machado @weverthon.com · 24/07/2024
📊When teaching or giving a talk, do you like presenting plots step by step, revealing e.g. one group at a time? This is often useful for walking through complex results. I made a R package that makes it extremely easy to do this! ggreveal: Reveal a ggplot incrementally #rstats #dataviz #ggplot2
weverthon.com
Reveal a ggplot incrementally
Provides functions that make it easy to reveal ggplot2 graphs incrementally. The functions take a ggplot2 object and return a list of plots showing data incrementally by panels, layers, groups, the va...
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Prof. EAGZ @emmmilygz.bsky.social · 29/06/2024
One for the syntax folk 🐦🐦
A sticker on a light post in Cambridge, reading "All stickers except stickers about stickers being prohibited are prohibited."
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🎮 Dr. Gremlin 😈 (they/she/any) @colorless.green · 08/06/2024
look upon my works ye mighty and despair
an intentionally ugly shirt that is absolutely covered in images of the only acceptable Praat logo: the original, which is so ugly that it's awesome
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Rasmus Puggaard-Rode @rpuggaardrode.bsky.social · 23/05/2024
praatpicture 1.2.0 is now on CRAN, time for a HYPE THREAD 👀💅💯💥🍾🎉🎆
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em 🐊 @emrem.bsky.social · 30/04/2024
I have some coloring sheets your language and #linguistics classes might enjoy for some finals season de-stressing! Here’s one of my students’ work! sites.google.com/view/ear-sci...
A completed coloring sheet reads “every body has an accent,” with an arm with IPA tattoos, signing hands, and a mouth
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Theresa Heyd @theresaheyd.bsky.social · 20/03/2024
Lego Creator Expert: The Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores
Lego Set Department Store, 16+
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Melanie I Stefan @melanieistefan.bsky.social · 14/02/2024
Roses are red Shapes have no sound Except kikis are pointy And boubas are round
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Kirby Conrod @kirbyconrod.bsky.social · 07/02/2024
Hey, I'm finally recruiting for a paid study! This is for anyone over 18 and fluent in English who uses neopronouns (like "xe," "fae," "thon," etc) as their personal pronouns. If you're interested, you can sign up to receive more information at the link below! Please share far and wide!!
forms.gle
Neopronouns interview study interest form
This form is to express interest in participating in an interview study conducted by Professor Kirby Conrod at Swarthmore College. Completing this interest form is just to give us a way to contact ...
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Rory Turnbull @roryturnbull.bsky.social · 18/10/2023
Students discussing the IPA: "to make the vowels nasal, you give them a moustache"
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Joshua Raclaw @joshuaraclaw.com · 02/02/2024
Overheard in a class working on some phonetics exercises: “which one is the uh-oh sound”
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Matt Hunt Gardner (he/him) @matthuntgardner.bsky.social · 29/01/2024
#linguistics Canadians are known for measuring distance in time (i.e *that’s about four hours away*). But what if we instead adopted “Canada geese” as a unit of measure? #canada #langsky www.jpost.com/science/arti...
jpost.com
Asteroid the size of 64 Canadian geese to pass Earth Tuesday - NASA
Calculations by NASA predict that the asteroid won't come anywhere close to Earth during its flyby.
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Jessi Grieser @jessgrieser.com · 17/01/2024
LingComm grants are live! Got a nacent LingComm project you need some additional funds to get off the ground? Apply before April 30. lingcomm.org/grants/
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Calle Börstell @cborstell.bsky.social · 17/01/2024
#linguistics
A stacked three panel meme of a conversation between the Beckhams:
"I found that all languages..."
"Be honest."
"The sample was typologically diverse!"
"Be honest."
"I didn't include sign languages."
"Thank you."
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Matt Hunt Gardner (he/him) @matthuntgardner.bsky.social · 08/01/2024
#Linguistics Wonder whether people are just as casual on Zoom as in-person? Are sociolinguistic interviews recorded online just as good at capturing *the vernacular* as those collected in people's living rooms? Check out my and VK's small study, published at last: doi.org/10.1515/ling...
doi.org
Gettin’ sociolinguistic data remotely: comparing vernacularity during online remote versus in-pers...
The following paper examines the use of the stable sociolinguistic variable ( -ing ) across two different interview modalities: “classic” in-person sociolinguistic interviews and identical intervi...
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Lauren "Hope is Praxis" Lastname @verbingnouns.bsky.social · 06/01/2024
Intro phonetics classes
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American Dialect Society @americandialect.org · 06/01/2024
"Enshittification" is the 2023 American Dialect Society word of the year. Read the full press release. americandialect.org/2023-word-of...
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Alexandra Pfiffner @ampfiffner.bsky.social · 06/01/2024
Me after my “Kenaissance” nomination won most creative word of the year #WOTY2023 #ADS2024
Ryan Gosling as Ken in the Barbie movie, wearing two pairs of sunglasses and thinking he’s hot shit
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American Dialect Society @americandialect.org · 05/01/2024
Now posted: The full list of nominees for ADS Word of the Year 2023. The final vote will be held this evening at 7:30 pm in the Metro East Ballroom at Sheraton Times Square. #WOTY2023 #ADS2024 #LSA2024 americandialect.org/nominations-...
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Joshua Raclaw @joshuaraclaw.com · 19/12/2023
New mary/merry/marry example just dropped !
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Alan Yu @aclyu.bsky.social · 18/12/2023
The Life Cycle of Language, our festschrift for Andrew Garrett, is now published! global.oup.com/academic/pro...
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Ryagon @ryagon.bsky.social · 06/12/2023
Currently thinking about divination with runes, but instead of runes you have IPA characters. "You got a /w/, which normally would mean you're well-rounded and glide easily through tough and complex situations. But since you got it upside-down, instead you just seem pretentious and weird."
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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 05/12/2023
Sperm whales have equivalents to human vowels. We uncovered spectral properties in whales’ clicks that are recurrent across whales, independent of traditional types, and compositional. We got clues to look into spectral properties from our AI interpretability technique CDEV.
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Christopher Carignan @carignan.bsky.social · 08/12/2023
Advice for the "earbuds method" of measuring nasalance: bandpass filter your signal to approximately the 400-700Hz range before calculating nasalance, regardless of the earbud type used. Incidentally, this is very close to the 300-750Hz filter range already recommended for nasometers!
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Gretchen McCulloch @gretchenmcculloch.com · 20/11/2023
Today in linguists are NOT KIDDING when we say that your capacity for language enables you to understand sentences that have never before been uttered in human history.
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Kathryn C-K @kathrynck.bsky.social · 15/11/2023
Beginning of term: Here is a kind but structured late policy Middle of term: Oh wow, I'm behind on your grading! Late penalty amnesty through Oct 30th! End of term: Literally just told a student "Time is meaningless and life is chaos"
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