We welcome eight new PhD students are joining our Department this year, who bring with them a wide array of experiences, strengths and interests. We are all looking forward to getting to know them better and learning from them.

Rawan Bonais hails from Al-Hasa, a city in eastern Saudi Arabia. She received my BA in English Translation from King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2010. Before coming to Michigan, Rawan completed an MA in Linguistics at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. Her primary research interests are in language contact, bilingualism and language acquisition. She is also interested in doing research on Arabic.

Chia-Wen Lo grew up in Taiwan, and received her MA in Linguistics in 2012 from National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan. She is interested in Psycholinguistics, mainly human sentence processing. In the future, she hopes to extend her research from psycholinguistics to computational linguistics, i.e. from understanding how human beings process languages to exploring whether computers can deal with language in the same way as humans.

Tamarae Hildebrandt is from Faribault, Minnesota. She received my BA in Linguistics and German from Carleton College in 2013. Her main research interest is in syntax. Her undergraduate thesis focused on a syntactic analysis of scrambling in Turkish wh-questions. She presented her research on Turkish questions at several undergraduate conferences in Linguistics.

Fahad Alrashed received his MA in Linguistics from the University of Colorado Boulder. Before joining the Linguistics doctoral program at University of Michigan, Fahad worked on a project on the coarticulatory variation in the production and perception of vowel nasalization in Saudi Arabic. In addition to nasalization, he is interested in speech perception, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, and coarticulatory variation.

Dom Bouavichith is a Minnesota native and completed his BA (Linguistics/French) and MA (French Studies) at New York University. He is interested principally in phonetics; his research thus far has focused on the acoustic manifestations of casual speech processes in American English and ultrasound imaging of coarticulation. Aside from phonetics, he hopes to dabble in sociolinguistics, language acquisition, and sound change.

Justin Craft grew up in Long Beach, California. He received both his BA & MA in linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Most recently he worked with the Speech Data Operations team at Google in Mountain View, California. His main research interests are speech perception, opaque phonological processes, constraint based phonology, and phonological learnability.

A Pittsburgh native, Emily Sabo earned her undergraduate degree at The Pennsylvania State University in 2014.  Her most recent work includes an investigation of the categorical vowel perception of Quichua-Spanish bilinguals from the highlands of Ecuador. She has also studied L2 morphosyntactic processes through the lens of a Spanish-English bilingual enclave in Granada, Spain. As a graduate student, she plans to study Spanish language contact within a sociolinguistic framework.

Moira Saltzman grew up in Metro Detroit and earned her BA in Language Philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College. After teaching English in South Korea, Moira completed her MA in Linguistics at Wayne State University in 2014. Moira spent 2014-2015 on Jeju Island, South Korea, building a talking dictionary of the endangered language of the island, funded by a Fulbright Study/Research Grant. She is interested in areal language change, particularly contact phenomena.