Achievement

In collaboration with IGERT faculty Bill Labov, IGERT trainee Josef Fruehwald has published work detailing a significant research effort to automatically analyze speech recordings of Philadelphia speakers. The authors applied "forced alignment" and "automatic vowel measurement" methods to a large corpus of neighborhood studies, including 379 speakers with dates of birth from 1888 to 1991. With these cutting-edge analysis methods, they were able to make significantly more detailed models of language dialect change within a well-studied community of speakers. This work has been getting significant attention in the media, e.g., on the NPR Brian Lehrer show:

"That Changing Philly Accent":http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2013/apr/09/changing-philly-sound/