Mike Putnam
Director

Mike Putnam‘s research seeks to gain further insight into the general cognitive architecture underlying the language faculty. To this end, bilingual and multilingual speakers present exciting and compelling challenges to current research in language science. A dominant focus of his research program investigates bilingualism across the lifespan, investigating global varieties of German (as well as other languages) in contact with other languages and societies. This research, conducted often in tandem with others scholars and his graduate students, incorporates experimental, formal, and functional methods, with the principal aim of leading to a better understanding of bilingual cognition and grammar. His research on bilingual grammars focuses on areas such as: contact linguistics, code-switching, L1 attrition, L2 acquisition (both natural and classroom-based), and L2 attrition. From a linguistic perspective, the majority of his research focuses on the structure (syntax & morphology) and meaning (semantics & pragmatics) of language and the connection between these two sub-components of grammar, with occasional explorations into phonological systems. Outside of his research in bilingualism and global varieties of German, he has published on topics such as the syntax-morphology interface, filler-gap dependencies, and event semantics.

​Contact: mike.putnam [at] psu [dot] edu

Richard Page
Co-Director

Richard Page’s research interests include language change, language contact, Pennsylvania German and other varieties of German in the United States, phonology, historical linguistics and older Germanic dialects. He has published articles on Germanic linguistics in a variety of journals including Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, Diachronica, and the Journal of Germanic Linguistics, and Lingua. He has done fieldwork on Moundridge Schweitzer German with other members of the lab. In addition, he has worked with Julia Kasdorf, Joshua Brown, the Mifflin County Mennonite Historical Society and Penn State University Libraries to collect oral histories of Pennsylvania German Anabaptists in nearby Big Valley. Michael T. Putnam and he are the co-editors of the book series Studies in Germanic Linguistics with the Ohio State University Press.

Contact: page [at] psu [dot] edu

Andrew Hoffman
Graduate Student

Rose Fisher
Graduate Student

Rose Fisher is a graduate student in German Linguistics and Language Science at Penn State University. She graduated from Millersville University in 2018 with a bachelors degree in German and Psychology. She is interested in Anabaptists not only linguistically and as a native speaker of Pennsylvania Dutch but also because she was born into an Amish family. Her parents decided to leave the community when she was eleven years old which is why she was able to go to high school and college. Her aims are to better understand the roots of the Pennsylvania Dutch language and people, to better understand how they are related to German and the German-speaking parts of Europe, and to connect with other people who are doing research in these areas.

Robert Klosinski
​Graduate Student

Robert Klosinski is a Ph.D. candidate, pursuing the dual-title degree of German Linguistics and Language Science. He graduated with a B.A. in German as a Foreign Language in 2013 from the Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena, Germany, and then earned his M.A. in German with an emphasize on Germanic Linguistics in 2016 from the University of Georgia.  For his master’s thesis, he analyzed American university students and their German vowel L2-production and L1 categorization. His research interests lie in diachronic and synchronic language contact phenomena, especially in terms of phonology and phonetics. He is currently studying Swiss heritage speakers of Ohio as well as Misiones, Argentina. Additionally, he is interested in other German dialects spoken in Misiones, such as Hunsrik.

Contact: robert.klosinski [at] psu [dot] edu

Ashley Pahis
​Graduate Student

Ashley Pahis is a PhD candidate, pursuing the dual-title degree of Hispanic Linguistics and Language Science.  He completed his B.A. at Francis Marion University in South Carolina in 2015, and earned an MA in Foreign Languages in Literature with a concentration in Hispanic Linguistics in 2017 from the North Carolina State University, as well as an MA in Hispanic Linguistics from The Pennsylvania State University in 2019.  For his Master’s thesis at NC State, he analyzed the acoustic characteristics of gay male speech in Spanish.  His research interests include sociophonetics as well as language processing in both Spanish and Portuguese.  He is currently studying the ongoing changes in the clitic system in Brazilian Portuguese and how these elements are produced and processed.  

Maike Rocker
​Graduate Student

Maike Rocker is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the dual-title track of the German Linguistics and Language Science program. She graduated with a Master of Education from the University of Bremen in 2016, where she had studied English and German. Maike taught German as a Foreign language at the University of Waterloo (Canada) in 2014-2015, and was a DAAD Visiting Lecturer for German Language at SUNY Binghamton before starting her studies at PennState. In her research, she is interested in the morphosyntax and semantics of minority and heritage languages, especially in the areas of tense, mood and aspect. So far, she has worked with speakers of Pennsylvania Dutch in Ohio and Low German speakers in Iowa.

Contact: mhr21 [at] psu [dot] edu

Sonya Trawick
​Graduate Student

Sonya Trawick is a student in the department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. Her previous and current work looks at language contact in Paraguay (Spanish and Guaraní), Misiones, Argentina (Spanish and Portuguese), and North Carolina and New Mexico (Spanish and English), with a focus in phonetics/phonology and morphosyntax.

Nora Vosburg
​Graduate Student

Nora Vosburg is a Ph.D. candidate, pursuing the dual-title degree of German Linguistics and Language Science. She received her Magistra Artium at the Christian-Albrecht Universität zu Kiel (Germany) and completed her PhD in Spanish Linguistics at the same university in 2015. Her research interests lie in language contact phenomena that emerge over long periods of time, in particular in event semantics. Currently, her research is focusing on bilingual heritage speaker communities in the Americas, and the interaction between extralinguistic and intralinguistic factors on language use.

​Contact: nxh924 [at] psu [dot] edu

Affiliates

Joshua Bousquette
Associate Professor, University of Georgia

Joshua Bousquette‘s research focuses on diachronic processes of language change, especially how bilingual and contact varieties pattern as compared to the natural language change observed over time in historical varieties; as well as on how social factors, when operationalized at the institution level, contribute to maintenance of the minority or heritage variety, as opposed to assimilation to the majority, hegemonic language. The ultimate goal of such research is to use or to derive empirical methods to better understand language change and language shift as complex systems, often with epiphenomenal causation. Working with non-standard varieties spoken in the US and in Europe, a primary focus of his research has focused on morphosyntax and agreement, including: complementizer agreement, parasitic gapping, left-dislocation, preposition stranding, and dative case realization in heritage varieties of German; additional work has focused on labor as a driving factor in social and economic integration of minority languages and cultures into the larger regional or national population. Outside of the field of heritage languages, he works on the history of Germanic.

Contact: bousquet [at] uga [dot] edu

Hyoun-A Joo
Assistant Professor, Furman University

Hyoun-A Joo earned her doctorate degree at Penn State in 2018. In her dissertation, she investigated the naturalistic L2 acquisition of the German asymmetric verb placement by first generation Korean immigrants employing syntactic models within the generative framework. Her research interests lie in the intersections of language / language acquisition, migration, and identity. She also conducted research with Mennonite heritage German speakers and heritage Korean speakers. After working one year as postdoc at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, she joined the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Furman University, SC, as assistant professor where she teaches German and linguistics.

Contact: hyoun-a.joo [at] furman [dot] edu

Lara Schwarz
Post-Doc, TU Dortmund

Lara Schwarz graduated from Penn State with a B.A. in German Studies in 2004, and then earned her M.A. in Linguistic and Literary Computing from the Technische Universität Darmstadt in 2009. For her master’s thesis, she developed a rule-based approach to automatically annotate Theme in English texts for register analysis. Prior to returning to Penn State, Lara worked as a German-English technical translator. Currently, Lara is pursuing her dual-title Ph.D. in German Linguistics and Language Science. Her research interests include the syntax-morphology-semantics relationship, language contact and heritage language attrition.

Contact: lara.schwarz [at] psu [dot] edu