Jacob Walter Boudreau

Language guy

Currently undergoing discovery

Meaning, this site is under-construction

What is this? Who are you?

A curious sort

I am mystified by humans, our behavior and, most of all, how we came to be who we are. It seems to be the case that the things that happen to us--language, culture, biology, society, etc.--shape a lot about what makes us who we are.

Whether you are a heritage speaker of another language, an immigrant, or simply a person who, like me, was almost always the youngest person in the room, something about these situations affect who you are and what you do.

These are all things I like thinking about, and I like to think they are what steer my writing and research.

Granted, on the writing side, much of this ends up being lost in confused abstractions. Therefore, I am actively seeking opportunities to branch out through more applied writing via stuff like scripts.

Experience

Professional Background

Lab Manager

University of Iowa VOICE Lab

Gained experience designing and administering linguistic experiments using a portable eye-tracker, Experiment Builder (e-Builder), Gorilla Experiment Builder, Eprime, electroencephalography (EEG) and social network surveys. Analyzed and visualized experiment data using statistical analysis programs such as Praat and RStudio. Designed and administered behavioral experiments, eye-tracking experiments and EEG experiments. Presented research at three local and two international conferences. Completed administrative tasks in the lab such as experiment scheduling, training, project management, and data storing and organization. This was also a paid position only in Summer 2024 and Summer 2025.

Undergraduate Student Ambassador Lead

UIowa Department of English

Met with prospective students and parents during visit days, leading a reading and writing group with first-year students to develop necessary skills in their desired areas through seminar, workshop and generative writing sessions. Coordinated the reading and writing groups by assigning students to their desired groups via a Qualtrics survey, trained ambassadors on proper protocols and pedagogical practices, ran monthly meetings, planned an end-of-semester event for the reading and writing groups, and created and sent out an evaluation survey at the end of the semester. This was a paid position.

Linguistic Fieldwork Summer Program

Caucasian Languages Georgia (CauLaGe)

Hands-on and onsite training in linguistic fieldwork on the language (Tsova-) Tush (often called Batsbi). Morning classes on (Tsova-) Tush grammar and major linguistic subfields. Afternoons spent eliciting linguistic data from speakers of the language under the supervision of organizers and evenings were spent analyzing data. Ultimately, described usage of copular (non-verbal or “be” verb) constructions and variations in its syntactic structure and typological categories. This was not a paid position as it was a summer school program.

Education

University of Iowa

MA in Linguistics with Data Analytics Focus

BA in English and Creative Writing; BA in Linguistics

Minor in Translation for Global Literacy

Some Key Achievements

Recognitions & Awards

Undergraduate Fiction Award

April 2024

Received a nomination and award for my fiction piece Really, a small thing.

Nominated by Kaveh Akbar.

Travel Grants for Acoustical Society of America Conferences

May 2024, 2025

Student Travel Grant for International Research – University of Iowa Office of Undergraduate Research – Acoustics Week in Canada May 13-17, 2024.

Student Travel Grant – Acoustical Society of America – Acoustics Week in Canada May 13-17, 2024.

Student Travel Grant – Acoustical Society of America – May 18-23, 2025.

Poster Presentations including but not limited to the ones from the above conferences

All with the University of Iowa VOICE Lab

“Real-Time Word Recognition in Heritage Speakers: Evidence from the Visual World Paradigm.”

March 29th, 2024 – Linguistics Day, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.

April 6th, 2024 – Second Language Acquisition Graduate Symposium, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.

May 13th – May 16th, 2024 – Acoustical Society of America, Acoustics Week in Canada, Ottawa, Canada.

“Sociogenerational Effects on Variability in Sentence Processing and Judgements.”

April 4th, 2025 – Linguistics Day, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.

“Changing Cues? How Korean Learners Navigate VOT and F0 in Korean Stop Categorization.”

May 22nd, 2025 – Acoustical Society of America, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States.

Notable Coursework

Fall 2022 - Spring 2025

For what it's worth.

Fall 2022; Spring 2023

Old English: Language and Literature; Old English: Beowulf (independent study)

UIowa | Final Grade: 95%; 99%

Two consecutive Old English (OE) literature classes that focused on gaining a translation proficiency in OE that would prepare us to translate, analyze and research a corpus of OE poetry in the first semester and the epic poem Beowulf the following semester. In the first of the two courses, OE: Language and Literature, I produced a close reading of the symbols of trees in the OE Poems The Wanderer, The Wife’s Lament, The Dream of the Rood, and The Husband’s Message and analyzed the historical, poetic and linguistic contexts which made that specific symbol unique to OE poetry providing my own translations for analysis. In OE: Beowulf, we met weekly to discuss and compare Modern English translations of the poem as reference and provided translations of 25-50 lines of our choosing using the Fourth Edition of Klaeber’s Beowulf and images of the original manuscripts from the British Library. Additionally, we would translate OE riddles, give short presentations on the literary theory surrounding Beowulf—such as the symbol of monsters in Early Medieval literature, Grendel and his mother through a feminist lens and the use of Grendel and the dragon as foils to Beowulf, among others. For a final project, I produced a translation portfolio amounting to a total of 2 Fitts of my choosing from the poem.

Spring 2023
Seminar in Comparative Literature: Romantic poetry and poetics

University of Iowa | Final Grade: 99%
Graduate seminar dedicated to understanding the cultural and historical contexts that led to the rise
of German Romanticism and its spread throughout Europe in the 19th Century. Using both original
texts and English translations, we looked closely at themes related to gender, literature, language
and translation in poetry and supplemental readings on them from scholars such as the Romantics
themselves, like Friedrich Schlegel, and later scholars such as the philosopher Walter Benjamin. My
semester project was a translation and close reading of select poems from the Spanish Romantic
poet Carolina Coronado with a focus on the gendered poetics and socio-political conflicts which
facilitated them as well as a comparison with work from Karoline von Günderrode whom we
discussed exhaustively in class.

Fall 2024 & Spring 2025

Statistical and Experimental Methods in Linguistics

University of Iowa | Final Grade: 100%

Mixed graduate and undergraduate course focused on two things: learning to analyze data in R Studio and learning to administer linguistic experiments according to the conventions in the field. The first semester culminated in a literature review preparing us to run our own experiments in the following semester. Preliminary analysis of pilot data consisting of 35 undergraduate psychology students at UIowa was included in my final write-up. Further testing and submission to scientific journals is expected in the next year.

- June, 2025

Languages:

Spoken Languages:

Spanish – Reading, translation and somewhat limited speaking proficiency.
German – Reading, translation and very limited speaking proficiency.
Old English – Reading and translation proficiency.
Arabic – Elementary reading and speaking proficiency in Modern Standard Arabic, maSri (Egyptian)
and shaami (Levantine) varieties.
Bahasa Indonesia – Some structural knowledge. Knowledge of different verb classes and their constructions.
Hungarian – Basic words and phrases.
Ōlelo Hawai’i – Some structural knowledge. Some time on Duolingo.

Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) – Some structural knowledge. Did a syntax research report on the antipassive particle.

Scripting Languages:

R – Working proficiency. Advanced statistical analysis for language science research.

Python – Limited proficiency. I've done some simple text processing and adapted a pipeline to analyze linguistic data.

Papyrus – Rudimentary knowledge. I can look at some code and make decent inferences about what it does.

Praat – Rudimentary knowledge. I can look at some code and make decent inferences about what it does.

EPrime – Very rudimentary knowledge. There are some back-end settings I can tweak for specific purposes.