A big congratulations to two of our wonderful undergraduate lab members, Sam Lyczowski and Lexi Williams, for their awarded January term travel grants through the Harvard University Center for African Studies! These funds will allow each student the opportunity to accompany Dr. Kathryn Franich on a fieldwork trip to Cameroon where they will spend time investigating speech patterns of native Medumba speakers across varying speech modes. Both students are very excited about this amazing opportunity! Here’s what they have to say about this wonderful accomplishment and what they plan to do during their time in Cameroon:
This grant comes from the Harvard University Center for African Studies and funds students traveling to Africa for research projects or internships. I will use this grant to explore timing patterns of turn-taking across different speech modes in Med
– Sam Lyczowski, Class of 2026umba, a Grassfields Bantu language spoken in western Cameroon. Storytelling in the Medumba tradition consists of highly formalized, rhythmic, almost musical speech, and constitutes a unique form of spoken interaction not found in other parts of the world. In order to compare turn-taking in storytelling speech and everyday speech, I will be spending a week in Yaounde and a week in Bamoun with the Harvard PhonLab, recording audio and video data of Medumba speakers.
I applied for this grant for the PhonLab’s J-Term 2025 Fieldwork Trip to Cameroon. We will travel to the capital, Yaounde, and several villages near Bangangte in the western, francophone region. In different segments, we will conduct language surveys (to understand which groups of people and languages are present), observe storytelling sessions in Med
– Lexi Williams, Class of 2026umba, and collect video data regarding children’s acquisition of rhythm. Both Dr. Franich and the CAS team have been incredibly supportive of this endeavor, and I’m very excited for this experience!
We are so proud of these students for their dedication to this work!