Ping Hei Yeung studies variation and change in World Englishes, such as those spoken in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Ghana. His dissertation examines the influence of language attitudes on sociophonetic variation in Malaysian English.
Abby Killam is interested in how identity influences the production and perception of speech, especially in a media or “high performance” context. Her dissertation focuses on the consumers of popular music, and how they perceive the use of different dialect features by artists of ostensibly different racial identities.
Claire Henderson’s research investigates dialect contact between Canadian and American English and how it shapes phonetic variation in each variety. She is interested in how national identity influences individuals’ use of vowel features such as Canadian Raising and the Low-Back-Merger-Shift.
Emily Sandall works on sociophonetic variation and gender identity. They are particularly interested in the theorization and operationalization of gender as a variable in sociolinguistic studies, and in intragender variability.