Last Friday, students from Columbia College, SEAS, and General Studies presented their work at the Columbia Undergraduate Research Symposium, with research in areas ranging from chemistry to comparative literature. Among the presenters were four linguistics students, who shared their summer research projects on Greek, Hawaiian, and more! Learn about them below:
Aneesha Needamangala CC’28: Aneesha applied a statistical model of language decline and adoption to the case of Hawaiian. Her project, titled “Modeling Endangered Language Shifts and Revitalization: Applying the Abrams-Strogatz Model to ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i,” was funded by the Laidlaw program and supervised by Professor Meredith Landman.
Ben Parkhurst CC’26: Ben used corpus linguistics techniques to study uptalk and gender in American English. Results from his project, titled “(Up)Talking to Ourselves: Rising Intonation in the Absence of Interlocutors,” suggest that speakers of all genders use uptalk in computer-directed speech, as well as face-to-face interactions. Ben’s research was supervised by Professor Susannah Levi at NYU.
Cara Chen CC’28: This summer, Cara researched English as a Second Language (ESL) pedagogy. She applied her findings to create ESL teaching materials for Haitian Creole speakers that incorporate the linguistic differences between the two languages. Cara’s project, titled “Improving Adult English Education in Underserved Communities in New York,” was funded by the Laidlaw program and supervised by Professor William Foley.
Vasily Tselioudis CC’26: Vasily spent his summer in Greece researching how speakers interpret embedded clauses with ambiguous subjects and objects. This project, titled “Nominative and Accusative Case in Modern Greek: Usage with Embedded Clauses,” is also the basis for his senior thesis. Vasily’s project was funded by URF and supervised by Professor Meredith Landman.
Learn more about these four linguistics presentations at our program’s Open House today from 4 to 6 pm at Deutsches Haus.
Congratulations to all the presenters!
