Submitted by Kelly Thornwood
on
Ty Gill-Saucier has been selected as a recipient of the Antoinette Wills Endowed Fund for Graduate Students for the 2026–2027 academic year. This award will support his sociophonetic research on Southern U.S. English, with a focus on vowel production and perception among Mississippi Gulf Coast Creole speakers. His project examines how listeners perceive “Southern speech” and how acoustic patterns become linked to regional, ethnoracial, and social meanings. The funding will help support conference travel to share this work, as well as participant compensation for a perception study investigating how non-Southern listeners process and socially evaluate vowel patterns from the Mississippi Gulf Coast.