Annika wins NSF support

Modeling the perception of non-native speech sounds.

Congratulations to Annika Shankwitz, who has been awarded support through the NSF's Graduate Research Fellowship Program for her project on "Computational optimal transport as a predictive model of second language speech perception." The award provides a five-year fellowship with three years of financial support. Nearly 2600 were given this year, across the country, and Annika is one of only six recipients in Linguistics, or nine if you add the rubric of "Natural Language Processing". Her work uses computational modeling and machine learning to predict how non-native speech sounds are perceived by language learners, and leverage these predictions to develop perceptually-focused language learning technology. She joins Sebastián and Sathvik among GRFP recipients from our department, who earned their awards in 2022 and 2024. In those years awardees in Linguistics (including "Psycholinguistics" in 2024) numbered 3 and 9, respectively, or 11 and 16 if you add NLP.