Tessa Moskoff and Rachel Wagner awarded 2024 David Rood Linguistics Undergraduate Scholarship

CU Linguistics is pleased to announce the 2024 winners of the David Rood Linguistics Undergraduate Scholarship, Tessa Moskoff and Rachel Wagner! Awarded since 2017, the David Rood Award recognizes a continuing student or students for their outstanding academic achievement in our undergraduate program, as well as potential for further success in linguistics. The scholarship of $500 is named in honor of Professor David Rood, who retired in 2016 after 48 years of teaching at CU.

Tessa Moskoff (left) is pursuing a Linguistics, Psychology, and Neuroscience triple major, and is interested in the intersection of the three fields. In the future, she hopes to conduct psycholinguistic research, exploring how cognition is shaped by (and shapes) language, especially relating to embodied cognition, neurodiversity, and the inner narrator. Currently, she is conducting research on child-directed speech alongside Dr. Bhuvana Narasimhan and Dr. Rebecca Scarborough, through the Studio Lab program. The project is questioning the differences between child-directed and adult-directed speech, in addition to whether child-directed speech serves to increase intelligibility for the child. Tessa is also an officer of Linguistics Club, has volunteered through Literacy Practicum’s program Reading Buddies, and helped organize this year’s distinguished speaker event, featuring Sonja Lang.

Rachel Wagner (right) is a Linguistics major with minors in Spanish and Ethnic Studies. Her areas of interest include ethnolinguistics, code switching, and idiolect analysis. She currently volunteers as an interpreter and translator for the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network and works as a tutor at the Herbst Academic Center. Rachel became passionate about linguistics after doing a research project on psycholinguistics in the 6th grade. She is writing an autoethnography about her family and the Chicano movement and beginning research on regional rap phonotactics. Rachel hopes to pursue a PhD in sociolinguistics after completing the BAM curriculum. When she’s not taking care of her puppy, Mavis, she loves to sing and even performed at “Prime’s Got Talent” here on campus.