Lab Members

Prof. Sharon Hargus

Currently, Professor Hargus is working with the Witsuwit’en language community. Previous fieldwork experience includes work with the Sahaptin, Deg Xinag, and Tsek’ene languages. In addition to fieldwork, Professor Hargus is revising the 2009 Sahaptin dictionary. See Professor Hargus’s for more information. [Personal Site]

After studying linguistics and myriad languages as an undergraduate at the UW in the early 70’s, I received by PhD in linguistics at U. Illinois working with Professor Charles Kisseberth, where I became dedicated full-time to the areas of language description and phonological theory. In the area of language description, I have focused mainly on the structure of African languages (with excursions into North Saami and Hawrami), and within African languages, my main concentration has been on Bantu languages.

After retiring from Ohio State University, I returned to Seattle, and continued an earlier project on the Logoori language of Kenya, which I have been working on since 2014. The goal of the Logoori Project is to create an extensive reference grammar of the morphological and phonological structure of the language, disseminated online and incorporating audio exemplars of the language. [Personal Site]

Megan Otani

Megan started working with the lab in Fall 2023. The project she has been working on since then is the Documentation and Description of the Pañara language. She started with transcription and documentation and has since moved to archiving field materials. 

Emily Kim

Emily is a senior majoring in Early Childhood & Family Studies and Psychology. She is interested in understanding how kids learn and think, specifically in processes like language acquisition and developmental cognition. She started working on her Psychology Honors project with Prof. Lapierre, Prof. Ferjan-Ramirez, and Ph.D. student Jessamine Jeter in Winter 2023, which examines child vocalizations in the Panãra community. In her free time, she enjoys trying and reviewing new restaurants, being active, and baking. 

Adrian Brunke

Adrian is a Linguistics major who joined the lab in Fall of 2023. He is working on on the processing of field materials for Panãra.

Alessio Tosolini

Alessio joined the Linguistics Fieldwork Lab in Fall of 2024, working with Ella De Falco and Myriam Lapierre on the acoustics of Panära vowels. His main contributions involve creating a pipeline to generate phone-aligned TextGrids using the Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA) and helping analyze the results through R plots. He has also conducted phonological fieldwork on Triestin (Triestine Venetian) and is working towards writing a JIPA Illustration of the language.