Western Washington University recently released the names of the Outstanding Graduates for the 2014-15 academic year. Lauren Gage, a Kentwood graduate, was named an Outstanding Graduate in Linguistics.

Gage graduated magna cum laude in June with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics with a minor in Spanish. She was a leading officer in Western’s Linguistics Club and was a linguistics tutor. She was nominated for the Taylor-Anastasio Award for her research and paper on people’s perception of males who use HRTs – or “high rising terminals,” known more colloquially as “uptalk,” or “Valley girl,” a type of speech more commonly associated with women.

She was a volunteer teaching assistant in an upper-division Linguistics class and contributed to the dialectology studies of Bert Vaux at the University of Cambridge. This fall, she’ll move to Ireland to pursue a master’s degree in Speech and Language Processing at Trinity College, Dublin, with a focus in either Speech Science or Experimental Phonetics and Phonology.

She is considering a career in forensic phonetics or in the improvement of electronically originated speech. She is the daughter of Helen Newman and Bruce Gage.