Sheri Wells-Jensen
Bowling Green State University
423 East Hall
Bowling Green, Ohio 43403
(419) 372-8935
swellsj AT bgnet.bgsu.edu
Dr. Wells-Jensen is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the ESOL Program at Bowling Green State University. She also coordinates BGSU's Minor in Linguistics
Her teaching and research interests include phonetics, applied phonology, psycholinguistics, speech production (especially slips of the tongue), language preservation, braille and xenolinguistics.
2011 Teaching Schedule
- Spring: ENG 2900, Language Study (MWF 11:30-12:20)
- Summer: ENG 6150, Modern English Linguistics (online)
NB: this course is currently full; check back about the waiting list if you wish to enroll. - Fall: ENG 5180, Applied Phonology (W 2:30-5:20)
This course is currently still open.
Current Projects
The Slips Pages: Accessible (and hopefully at least moderately amusing) introduction to slips of the tongue.
The Language Creation Pages are a heavily-annotated guide to the creation of your own language. These pages are used in both ENG 6150 and ENG 2900.
A growing resource of Language Analysis Problems, some with answers posted and some without.
Oroha is an endangered language spoken in a small village on the Solomon Islands. The site shows the current grammatical sketch of the language and the growing dictionary.
The tenBroek library at the National Federation of the blind headquarters in Baltimore, MD, houses the personal papers of civil-rights lawyer and NFB founder Jacobus tenBroek. Written in grade III contracted braille, the papers are (historically and culturally) an invaluable source of information on tenBroek's life and activities and (linguistically) a fascinating case study of grade III braille usage.
VoxDB: The Voice Database is a growing archive of the voices of culturally significant figures.
Just for musical fun: The Braille Song, performed by Innocuous Mustard, featuring Perkins Brailler percussion.
Selected Research Articles
- Slips of the Dot
- This on-going research shows how expert Braillists process the writing task and how it compares to typing on a standard QWERTY keyboard. Here's a link to a 2007 article published in the Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness.
- Cross-Linguistic Slips of the Tongue
- Slips of the tongue occur in all languages, in equivalent amounts. However, languages vary when it comes to the relative amounts of different kinds of slips. Here's a link to a 2007 article published in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.
- Wells-Jensen, Jason, and Wells-Jensen, Sheri (2003). Clustering of speech errors. LACUS Forum 29: Linguistics and the Real World. Houston, TX: Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States. 359-364. It turns out that once you make a speech error, you are likely to make another one very shortly. Errors, in fact, tend to cluster.
- Wells-Jensen, Jason, and Wells-Jensen, Sheri (2003). Clustering of speech errors. LACUS Forum 29: Linguistics and the Real World. Houston, TX: Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States. 359-364. It turns out that once you make a speech error, you are likely to make another one very shortly. Errors, in fact, tend to cluster.
- Braille literacy issues
- Wells-Jensen, Sheri, Jason Wells-Jensen, and Gabrielle Belknap. "Changing the public's attitude toward braille: a grassroots approach." Journal of visual
impairment and blindness, v. 99, Mar. 2005: 133-140. A look at what ordinary people do to boost literacy.
- Just Say No to Reading Braille? Part One, November 2002 Braille Monitor and Part Two, March 2003 Braille Monitor
Updated: March, 2011 - Just Say No to Reading Braille? Part One, November 2002 Braille Monitor and Part Two, March 2003 Braille Monitor