Meet Dr. Abby Walker
ENGLISH
Abby Walker is an associate professor of linguistics in the English Department at Virginia Tech, and director of The Speech Lab at Virginia Tech. Her work investigates the ways in which individuals change their speech in the moment (depending on who they are talking to or what they are talking about) and over time (because of changes in their community, or because they change communities); the mechanisms behind cross-dialectal speech perception; and the social evaluation of language. Her work pulls from sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and phonetics, and although her work primarily looks at different dialects of English, she has recent collaborative projects on Korean and Spanish.
Labs: The Speech Lab
ENGL 1514: Language and Society
Pathway Area 3: Reasoning in the Social Sciences
Pathway Area 7: Critical Analysis of Identity and Equity in the United States
Catalog Description:
English language variation considered from social, regional, ethnic, gender, and style perspectives. Emphasis on vernacular varieties of American English. Attention paid to the social evolution of different language varieties and sociolinguistic perceptions of language ideologies. Introduction of methods of data analytics.
CRN: 85224
MWF 11:15AM - 12:05PM
MCB 134
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ENGL 2034: Analyzing the Sounds of Language
Pathway Area 5f: Foundational Quantitative and Computational Thinking
Catalog Description:
Examination of the acoustic attributes of vowels and consonants using quantitative techniques. Statistical analysis of acoustical differences between and within speakers, enabling predictions about future language choices and outcomes. Basic introduction to using computational software for data processing and visualization, and to ethical issues that arise in collecting an analyzing data.
CRN: 91406
MWF 1:25PM - 2:15PM
ROB 101