Students showcase capstone linguistics research

Fourth-year Linguistics students had the chance to design, conduct and evaluate their own experiments this term as part of their capstone project.

From pitch differences in storybook reading to varying pronunciations between Vancouver Island and Interior BC residents, the ambitious group of students took on 14 different experiments.

Department of Linguistics lecturer Sandra Kirkham said the project was also a test of “replicability.” Students paired with a classmate to conduct the same experiment to determine how reliable their findings were.

Kirkham, who says many of the students will go onto careers in speech pathology, said the capstone course gave students the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned throughout their degree.

The results of their work were on display at the Experimental Phonetics Poster Session on April 10.

“This is my first time actually designing an experiment and going out and collecting the data,” linguistics major Sophia Chan says. “For the most part, I’m happy about the way it turned out.”