Megan Jane Crowhurst is an Australian- and Canadian-raised linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States.

Career

Crowhurst earned her BA in Linguistics at the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public university, public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks a ...

(1985) and the MA and PhD at the

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it was the first university in the Arizona Territory. T ...

(1989 and 1991). She has held academic positions at

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

, the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States ...

, and, since 1999, in the Department of Linguistics at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

. She works in the area of

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

, researching aspects of prosody, especially prosodic morphology, phonological stress, and the perception of rhythm. Often focusing on documenting these aspects within

endangered language An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...

s, she has conducted fieldwork with speakers of Tupi-Guarani languages in

Bolivia , image_flag = Bandera de Bolivia (Estado).svg , flag_alt = Horizontal tricolor (red, yellow, and green from top to bottom) with the coat of arms of Bolivia in the center , flag_alt2 = 7 × 7 square p ...

and speakers of Zapotec in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Honors and distinctions

Crowhurst was a member of the

Linguistic Society of America The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...

(LSA) task force that created the Women In Linguistics Mentoring Alliance (WILMA) to provide a system to offer mentoring opportunities for female linguists. She also served on the LSA committee, Endangered Languages and Their Preservation, chairing the committee in 2001. Crowhurst has served as the Senior Associate Editor (2016-2017) and Co-editor (2017-2020) of the journal

Language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...

. She is a co-founder of the LSA journal Phonological Data and Analysis. Crowhurst was inducted as a

Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is an honor accorded by the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) to distinguished members of the society. LSA Fellows are "members of the Society who have made distinguished contributions to the dis ...

in January 2021.

Selected publications

Megan J. Crowhurst. 2019. The Iambic/Trochaic Law: Nature or Nurture? ''Language and Linguistic Compass''. DOI: 10.1111/lnc3.12360
Megan J. Crowhurst. 2018. The influence of varying vowel phonation and duration on rhythmic grouping preferences among Spanish and English speakers. ''J. Phonetics'' 66 (Jan.), 82-99. DOI: 10.1016/j.wocn.2017.09.001
Megan J. Crowhurst. 2018. The joint influence of vowel duration and creak on the perception of internal phrase boundaries. ''J. Acoustical Society of America'' 143(3), EL147-153. DOI: 10.1121/1.5025325
Megan Crowhurst. 2016. Iambic-Trochaic law effects among native speakers of Spanish and English. ''Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology'' 7(1), 12. https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.42
Megan Crowhurst and Sara Trechter. 2014. Vowel-rhotic metathesis in Guarayu. ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 80, 127-173. https://doi.org/10.1086/675421
Megan Jane Crowhurst and Lev D. Michael. 2005. Iterative footing and prominence-driven stress in Nanti (Kampa). ''Language 81(1), 47-95.'' https://doi.org10.1353/lan.2005.0013

References

External links

LSA Member Spotlight: http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/january-2016-member-spotlight-megan-crowhurst Video, “Beyond the Iambic-Trochaic Law”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0wiCzy4YBA Faculty page at UT Austin: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/linguistics/faculty/crowhurs The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America—South American Languages Collection of Megan Crowhurst: *https://www.ailla.utexas.org/islandora/object/ailla%3A124383 {{DEFAULTSORT:Crowhurst, Megan Women linguists University of Arizona alumni University of Texas at Austin faculty Living people Linguists of Uto-Aztecan languages Year of birth missing (living people) Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America Academic journal editors 1961 births