I am an Associate Professor in the Linguistics program at Dartmouth College. I finished my Ph.D. at UCLA in 2014, with the dissertation Replacive grammatical tone in the Dogon languages, available for download under “Papers and handouts”. My primary research interests lie in phonology, morphology, and fieldwork/language documentation. My current research focuses on documenting and analyzing the linguistic underpinnings of musical surrogate languages (e.g. talking drums) around the world, support by an NSF CAREER grant (BCS-1943896).

Contact: Laura.E.McPherson@Dartmouth.edu

To download the newest (August 2019) beta version of DAPPr (Discrete Annotations of Pitch and Prosody, formerly known as ATLAS), click here. 

News and upcoming events

Two new papers added to the Papers and Handouts page!

I’ve started a podcast on musical surrogate languages, When Music Speaks! Check it out here, or listen on any podcast platform.