Pitch Perfect: Mentoring Grant Recipients Champion Undergraduate Participation in Hawaiian Phonetics Research

Research targeting the revitalization of ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i, cross-departmental collaboration, and a scholarly approach that centers interpersonal dynamics—these elements and more coalesce to form the Mentoring Grant project by Drs. N. Ha‘alilio Solomon and Andrew Cheng that one proposal reviewer called “the ideal use of UROP funding.”

Solomon and Cheng (assistant professors in the Kawaihuelani Center for Hawaiian Language and the Department of Linguistics, respectively) received the Mentoring Grant twice, in 2024 and 2025, for their project “Undergraduate-Led Linguistics Research in Hawaiian Phonetics,” an exploration of how stressed syllables are pronounced by contemporary Hawaiian speakers. “For a long time, I’ve been interested in the twin issues of pitch and vowel length in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi,” shared Solomon. “For example, when we say a vowel is ‘long,’ how long is it, exactly? How much longer is a long vowel than a short vowel? As a kumu ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, I’m also keenly aware of differences in pronunciation, particularly in speakers’ pitches, when they say certain words.”

Said Cheng, “My background is in phonetics and sociolinguistics, so I research accents and pronunciation, as well as the patterns that distinguish different speakers (for example, dialectal patterns).” Cheng’s skillset made him the ideal collaborator for Solomon, who reached out to initiate a partnership in 2023. “[Solomon] got in touch with me even before I’d moved here, and I was immediately on board once we started discussing his ideas. I knew that this project would be important, and it would be my kuleana to contribute where I could,” stated Cheng.

The pair expects their study of ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i stress patterns to help linguists understand how pronunciation has evolved over time and to inform language pedagogy—areas of particular significance for the revitalized language. Their work has been divided into two broad phases: in 2024, they hired two undergraduates—Maikalewa Keamoai-Koka (Travel Industry Management and Hawaiian Studies double major) and Hunter Procter (Interdisciplinary Studies major)—to collect data from over two dozen fluent Hawaiian speakers; and in 2025, they will again work with two undergraduates to transcribe, code, and analyze this data.

Keamoai-Koka, a native speaker of Hawaiian and Solomon’s former student, was able to leverage familial connections to recruit participants and bring important insight to the project. “Maikalewa already knew a lot of the research participants. His background knowledge of and membership in the community made it easier for him to facilitate data collection,” Solomon stated. “I encouraged him to trust his intuition whenever he might be nervous. I noticed that this research project allowed him to gain confidence not just in his speaking skills, but also in interacting with people in a professional research setting.”

Procter, on the other hand, is a former student of Cheng and was more closely involved with literature review and the preparation of the data set to be analyzed in the next portion of the project. “I wanted to do my part as a foreigner in Hawai‘i and give back to the place I now call my home,” said Procter, “and the best way for me to do that with my skills was to work in Hawaiian linguistics. Since I had never done any kind of linguistics project before, I thought it would also be a great opportunity for me to gain experience in the professional side of linguistics.”

The mentors’ pre-existing relationships with their mentees helped to quickly establish a team rapport, and over the course of approximately 16 weeks during Summer 2024, the four built a robust set of linguistic data based on recordings of the participants recruited by Keamoai-Koka. “My role for the UROP project, at least last summer, was training in technical skills, like showing our students how to operate the microphones and the software that we used to record and analyze data,” said Cheng. “Overall, it was like a project-based learning experience for the mentees. With ongoing, real-life research, unexpected issues can come up, and we have to find solutions as we go. There was a lot of trial and error, and I focused on ensuring that mistakes were amended but never seen as ‘fatal.'”

Procter’s participation in the Mentoring Grant culminated in a poster presentation at the November 2024 New Waves of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) Conference, held in Miami. “Most undergraduates don’t get this kind of academic opportunity,” Procter stated. “At UH Mānoa specifically, we do not have an undergraduate linguistics major, so it is quite difficult to find opportunities to persist and challenge myself as an up-and-coming linguist, [so] a prestigious conference like NWAV opens up many doors.”

“I am very proud of our mentees,” shared Cheng. “They should be proud of the work they did and their growth…[Procter’s] growth from never having done research like this to being able to talk confidently about the project in front of a large audience was outstanding.”

For Cheng and Solomon alike, a focus on the pilina among those involved in the research was—and continues to be—the project’s bedrock. “I think it’s important for mentors to not just see the mentee as an equal, but to treat them like one. Speak from the heart, act from the heart, and remember that everyone is connected by relationships. We need to mālama those relationships,” Solomon said.

“It’s supremely important when doing any research (in any field!) that interfaces with endangered languages, and with Indigeneity in general, that the people are put first and their needs and wants are respected,” Cheng remarked. “As a scientist, I understand the temptation to reduce people to little data points, but I’m learning to resist that by remembering the cultural importance of what I do.”

Looking beyond the completion of the project’s second phase in Summer 2025, the pair hopes to not only disseminate the findings of their Mentoring Grant research in the form of broadly accessible instructional materials and short documentaries, but to also shift the way research is done about ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i: “We understand that in the past, scientific research about Hawai‘i or Hawaiian culture has not been sensitive to the culture or well-being of the people,” said Solomon. “If we want to renormalize Hawaiian, we do need to treat it with scientific rigor, ‘poking and prodding’ it the way that English and many other languages have been for decades. I want us to be comfortable treating the language as worthy of scientific research.”

Indeed, Solomon and Cheng’s work exemplifies the utility of UROP’s Mentoring Grant both as a tool for recruiting UH Mānoa’s undergraduate students to conduct research, as well as for cultivating new scholars who esteem, in equal measure, knowledge and its ethical, socially conscious creation.