As announced in this News Office release,  http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/new-institute-diversity-sciences-awards, two seed grants from the new Institute of Diversity Sciences were awarded to teams involving faculty in our department:

“Discovering African American English Speech Melodies,” Kristine Yu and Lisa Green, linguistics, Meghan Armstrong-Abrami, languages, literatures and cultures, with Brendan O’Connor, computer science.

“Processing Non-native Speech in Noisy Classrooms,” Lisa D. Sanders, psychological and brain sciences, Meghan Armstrong-Abrami, Hispanic linguistics, Kristine M. Yu, linguistics, and Anne Gilman, visiting assistant professor of psychology.

These grants will allow the research teams to gather pilot data to form the basis of external grant proposals. The seed grant proposal process was highly competitive, so it’s a great accomplishment for Linguistics to be so well represented in them (2 of 6). Congratulations and thank you Kristine and Lisa!