Connor Bechler
About Me
I am currently a PhD student in Linguistics at Michigan State University, where I am a member of the MI Diaries Project, Sociolinguistics Lab, and PhonoGroup.
Theoretically, I am particularly interested in socially motivated language change, language attitudes/ideologies, and the phonetics/phonology interface.
My current work revolves around developing computational tools to facilitate the collection, annotation, and analysis of speech corpora, particularly for sociolinguistics and language documentation.
I graduated with an MA in Linguistic Theory and Typology from the University of Kentucky in 2023 and a BA in Linguistics, Literature, and Chinese from Calvin University in 2020.
Research
Bechler, C. (2024, January 11). Automatic Analysis of Audio Diary Speech Duration and Relative Speech Volume. [Conference presentation]. American Dialect Society 2025 Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. [Abstract PDF] [Slides]
Bechler, C. (2024, November 9). Evaluating wav2vec 2.0 Speech Recognition and Forced Alignment on a Multi-Varietal Language Documentation Collection. [Conference presentation]. New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 52, Miami, Florida, United States. [Abstract PDF] [Slides]
Bechler, C. (2024, November 1). Developing Semi-Automatic Annotation for Documentation and Sociolinguistic Analysis​: Lessons from a Multi-Varietal Oral Art Collection​. [Conference presentation]. Graduate Linguistics Expo at Michigan State (GLEAMS) 2024, East Lansing, Michigan, United States.
Sneller, B., Werner, R., Rechsteiner, J., & Bechler, C. (2024). MiDRF Admin Portal. https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.13617857
Bechler, C. (2023, October 14). Automatic Transcription of Documentation Recordings for Sociolinguistic Analysis: Speech Recognition and Forced-Alignment for Northern Prinmi [Poster presentation]. New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 51, Queens, New York, United States. [Poster PDF]
Bechler, C. (2023). Automatic Transcription of Northern Prinmi Oral Art: Approaches and Challenges to Automatic Speech Recognition for Language Documentation. [External Link to Thesis PDF]
Kayali, N. & Bechler, C. (2023, March 3-4). Investigating Historical Language Ideologies in Multilingual Contexts: A Novel Sociohistorical Framework [Poster presentation]. 15th Annual Meeting of the Illinois Language and Linguistics Society, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, United States. [Poster PDF]
Software/Tools
The MI Diaries Research Framework: A suite of tools originally developed for the MI Diaries project for collaboratively creating, navigating, and annotating audio corpora. I contributed to the documentation and bug-testing of the suite.
DiSpeechEval: A Python tool I am developing for the quick summarization of speech quantity and quality using voice activity detection.
wav2vec2fasr: A collection of resources and Python interface I am developing for finetuning wav2vec2 models for low-resource automatic speech recognition and forced alignment.
Non-Academic Interests
In my free time, I enjoy reading (primarily fiction, although also essays and poetry), programming, epee fencing, hiking, backpacking, and cooking (although I am not a particularly fast cook).
I am always in the market for new books, recipes, and hiking spots! If you feel generous, send me your recommendations via email!