Faculty and students researching and studying linguistics are busier with words than your most talkative friend. Three faculty members from the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) were inducted as Fellows into the premiere linguistics organization and a doctoral student receive an exclusive award for her research paper.
The new fellows in the Linguistics Society of America (LSA), the leading organization in the support and dissemination of linguistic scholarship, are: Kaori Idemaru, professor of Japanese linguistics and department head of East Asian languages and literature, Volya Kapatsinski, professor and department head of linguistics, and Spike Gildea, professor of linguistics. The three served as co-directors of the LSA’s five-week Summer Institute, hosted at the University of Oregon in 2025.
Each year the LSA executive committee recognizes up to eight members as fellows. A fellow is recognized for scholarly excellence, service to language communities, teaching excellence and sustained effort in these areas over the course of their careers.
“I have contributed [KI1] to the field all my professional life, but because of this recognition,” Idemaru said, “I feel I need to do more to advocate for the study of linguistics and also help younger generations of researchers to flourish. I feel gratitude and responsibility at the same time.”
Research projects in linguistics
Idemaru and Kapatsinski are one year into a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation. Their project, “The Role of Learned Selective Attention in Accent Adaptation,” is researching speech perception.
As part of the project, they are conducting experiments in Korea with Korean listeners and creating a video game. Both will be based on their research findings of facilitating this kind of speech adjustment.
The video game will center on a grandma who must throw cookies at creatures coming at her from all sides. If players listen to the sounds the creatures make, they will be more successful in protecting the grandma. It will encourage listeners to pay attention to certain aspects of sounds.
“We have a remarkable capacity to be able to adjust our auditory system to understand speakers who have accents or other idiosyncratic patterns,” said Idemaru. “So we investigate how those remarkable processes happen and also how we can facilitate that adjustment process.”
Gildea recently spent a year on sabbatical in the Amazon. He is currently deeply involved in the project “Collaborative Documentation of an Amazonian Language,” sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The first result of the project is an online quadrilingual dictionary with 3,612 entries as of January 5, 2026, which tribal authorities opened to the public.
Award for linguistics research paper
Doctoral student Carina Ahrens ’29 is working on the speech perception project led by Idemaru and Kapatsinski. Her research presentation about it won a best student paper award from the Acoustical Society of America. Out of 120 papers, only five received awards.
Her paper investigates the role of selective attention in reweighting of dimensions that are used to distinguish similar sounds from each other. By exploring how to help language learners, “We can maybe develop some framework, which helps them later down the line to actually learn to differentiate accents or learn to adapt to accents,” she explained.
Ahrens became interested in linguistics from childhood music lessons, which developed into the study of musicology and multilingualism. “I like the tiny little things in phonetics that you have to pay attention to and how you can manipulate them to make people perceive something or test how they perceive it just by very small and precise differences.”
These are just a few examples of the activities in the linguistics department, which addresses three broad themes: linguistic diversity and society; language learning and technology; and language processing and human health. Find more information about linguistics in CAS here and the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures here.
— By Violet Ashley, College of Arts and Sciences