GV Lab Presents Screening of Felix Kpogo Colloquium

Felix Kpogo

Brown University

Friday, November 7, 2025
2 p.m.–3:30 p.m.

Dewey Hall 1-101 Auditorium

The Grammar and Variation Lab will be screening a colloquium by Felix Kpogo, titled "Growing into Complexity: How Children Navigate the Development of Stop Contrasts in Gã."

Felix Kpogo is a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Linguistics Program at Brown University. He earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Boston University in August 2024. His research centers on phonetics and phonological development and language variation and change, with a particular focus on understudied language communities.

Felix’s research addresses two main questions: the first is 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 they have for theories of language development, and second, he adopts a variationist sociolinguistic approach to examine the production and perception dynamics of sound change in the Akan, a language spoken in Ghana.

Broadly, his research program seeks to decolonize and diversify linguistics, especially in language acquisition and variationist sociolinguistics, fields that have historically focused on Western languages and communities. His work has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, the International Journal of Bilingualism, and the Journal of Phonetics.