Dr. Jennifer Abel

Jennifer was the Coordinator of UBC’s Language Sciences initiative from November 2015 through August 2017, and is now working with the Health Outcomes and Language (HOLa) team. She is currently the Training Coordinator with the Portage Network of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. She earned her PhD in Linguistics from UBC in 2015, writing on the effect of task difficulty on phonetic convergence. (It involved LEGO®.) She has taught linguistics courses at UBC, the University of Calgary, and Mount Royal College.

Jennifer has always told her linguistics students that the fact that in general, humans talk all the time, from a very young age, and most of the time they understand each other, is a very cool thing. She believes that language is best studied in a variety of ways, and that interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches will bring the fullest and deepest answers to the immensely complex questions that language raises.