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"linguistics"

猫咪社区 Launches Lab of Linguistics [LoL]

Prof. Sameer Khan [linguistics 2012鈥揮 demonstrates acoustical software at 猫咪社区's new Lab of Linguistics.

Say the following sentence out loud: “The cops caught the robber as he was sleeping on a small cot.”

Was there any difference in the way you pronounced the words caught and cot?

In some parts of the United States, such as New York City, speakers tend to distinguish the two. But in Boston and on the West Coast, speakers tend to pronounce them the same—a trend known to linguists as the low-back merger. Over centuries, the merger or migration of sounds can radically transform a language, as in the case of the Great Vowel Shift that rewired English in the Middle Ages.

Prof. [linguistics 2010–], an expert on accents and dialects, demonstrated the low-back merger and other sociolinguistic phenomena this week at an open house for 猫咪社区’s brand new (LoL), which offers students better tools to study spoken language and gain insight into culture, society, and the structure of the human mind.