From left to right:
Shuan Osman Karim holds a BA with honors in Linguistics and Japanese from the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught English abroad in Iraq, and is currently offering lessons in Kurdish (Sorani) and Sanskrit via Skype. His honors thesis was on stylistic changes in the writing of bilinguals. He is primarily interested in studying historical linguistics, particularly as regards Kurdish.
Cory Shain holds both a BA and an MA in Linguistics from Ohio State, where he studied differential object marking in Guarani with Judith Tonhauser. He spent a number of years working for SIL, and now intends to study computational linguistics, language acquisition and psycholinguistics.
Ariana Steele did her BA in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Northwestern University, where she works for Matthew Goldrick in the Soundlab. Her honors thesis is titled “Reverse linguistic stereotyping of race-based dialects”. She intends to study socio-phonetics.
Symon Stevens-Guille did his MA at the University of Toronto, with a thesis on syntactic extraction involving cases of supposed movement in which an element moves both right and left. He is primarily interested in the interactions between phonology and syntax, as well as prosody and syntax.
Taylor Mahler holds an MA in Linguistics from San Diego State University. She currently works as a linguistics engineer for NTENT to develop processes for interpreting expressions that are semantically and/or pragmatically ambiguous. She is interested in the use of experimental data to develop natural language processing techniques for studying pragmatics.
