Africa Initiative

Dr. Felix Kpogo is a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Linguistics Program at Brown University. His research centers on language development, linguistic variation change, with a particular focus on understudied language communities. His research addresses two broad questions: First, how typically developing children acquiring their first language(s) navigate the process of learning the complex linguistic systems found in African languages and the implications this has for theories of language development, and second, he adopts a variationist sociolinguistic approach to examine the production and perception dynamics of sound change in Akan, a language spoken in Ghana. Overall, his research program aims to decolonize and diversify linguistics, particularly in the subfields of language acquisition and variationist sociolinguistics, which have traditionally focused on Western communities and languages. Dr. Kpogo's scholarly work has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of African Languages and Linguistics and the Journal of the International Phonetic Association.