Vincent Chanethom, Senior Lecturer in the Department of French and Italian, has received a 2026–27 Magic Grant for Innovation from Princeton University’s Humanities Council for a new linguistics project developed in collaboration with Florian Lionnet, Associate Professor in the Program in Linguistics.

The project, “The Relationship Between Acoustic Output and Lingual Articulation of Canadian French Vowels: Comparing Different French Varieties,” uses ultrasound tongue imaging to examine the relationship between the sounds of Canadian French vowels and the tongue movements that produce them. By combining acoustic analysis with articulatory data, the study will compare phonetic patterns across varieties of French and contribute to a fuller understanding of French speech production.

The grant also supports the continued development of the Non-Native Articulatory (NNA) Corpus – French, an open-access database of audio and ultrasound recordings of native and non-native speakers of French. Launched in 2021 and hosted by the Department of French and Italian, the corpus provides both acoustic and articulatory data for researchers, teachers, and learners of French.

This inter-institutional collaboration brings together scholars from Princeton, the University of Ottawa, Carleton University, and Seoul National University. The Humanities Council’s Magic Grants support projects that break new ground intellectually or pedagogically; for this project, the grant will also help integrate research and training into “The French Sound System,” an upper-level French phonetics course cross-listed in French and Italian and Linguistics.