Research

Research projects

Selected recent projects, and ongoing research interests

Language science at the museum

We invite visitors to Planet Word museum to contribute to science via participation in research, and to have conversations about language with budding language scientists. We particularly recruit as trainees minority students who are traditionally underrepresented in the language sciences. Read more about this NSF-funded collaborative project here. (With Yi Ting Huang, Deanna Gagne, Patrick Plummer, Jan Edwards, Rochelle Newman, Colin Phillips, Laura Wagner, and Julie Cohen)

Episodic encoding of voices in memory

What affects how spoken words are encoded in memory, particularly for non-white speakers and listeners? A series of studies re-examines classic talker specificity effects to better understand the limits and generality of episodic encoding across diverse talkers. (With Meghan Sumner, Will Clapp, and Simon Todd)

The development of indexicality in children

Most adults have beliefs about the languages and accents and speech features they think are smart and sophisticated, and which sound uneducated. But, how did they come to have those beliefs? What do children's social-semiotic landscapes look like? How do we theorize indexicality through a developmental lens? How and when in development do features of language come to take on social meaning? (With Kara Becker)

Listener knowledge about sociolinguistic variation

Linguistic and social properties probabilistically condition the production of sociolinguistic variables. Do listeners expect to hear variables realized according to those constraints? How much do listeners expect certain linguistic features to co-vary with one another? How are sociolinguistic variants mentally represented? (Selected projects with Tyler Kendall, Nicolai Pharao, Matthew Christopher Hunt, Zach Maher)

Bias in criminal justice settings

Does a speaker's language variety, and how they are racialized, affect outcomes across different contexts within criminal justice situations?

(With Sharese King and Adam Dunbar)

Listening to L2 speakers

What inferences do listeners make about second language learners? What factors affect the social biases listeners have, and the intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness ratings that listeners make?

(Selected projects with Aubrey Whitty, Melissa Baese-Berk)

Source memory

To what extent is a speaker's accent automatically encoded in memory? Is this symmetrical across native and non-native accents? Do source memory misattributions occur more often within- than across-accents?

(With Nicole Dudukovic)

Indexical processing

When attending to one indexical dimension of a talker, can a listener ignore other characteristics of the talker, or are indexical dimensions processed integrally? My dissertation examined which language a bilingual is speaking, in interaction with talker identity, gender, and amplitude. My ongoing work examines these questions for other dimensions like race, gender, and region.

Perceptual learning

What mechanisms help us understand unfamiliar speakers? Does social information and distributional information affect lexically-guided perceptual learning, and how listeners generalize what they have learned? (Selected projects with Molly Babel, Michael McAuliffe, Kaori Idemaru, and Kaylynn Gunter)

Distributional variation

What conditions within-category variation, for both L1 and L2 speakers? Is L2 speech always more variable than native speech? To what extent are patterns of variability structured across segments, across talkers, and across speech styles?

(Selected projects with Kaori Idemaru, Melissa Baese-Berk, Kaylynn Gunter)

Automation in measurement and coding

How can machine learning and other computational tools be harnessed to automate common sociophonetic analyses, including vowel measurements and variable coding? What are the pitfalls of relying on automated tools; to what extent are their systematic biases similar or different to humans' biases?

(Selected projects with Tyler Kendall)

Selected past projects

Selected past research projects (mostly here for archival purposes)

Native language classification

For my master's project, I conducted a computational classification of transcribed spoken English into native language backgrounds using SVMs with character n-grams as feature vectors. (With Janet Pierrehumbert and Hannah Rohde)


Neighborhood density

I examined the effects of lexical competition (namely, neighborhood density) on speech production. Specifically, the project investigated variation in pre-coda vowel duration in words with and without a minimal pair differing only in coda voicing. (With Matt Goldrick)

Vowel plots in motion

How can we visualize vowel plots dynamically, over the course of a speech recording? Some initial explorations with one sociolinguistic interview recording can be found at the following links. (With Anne Fabricius and Tyler Kendall.)

  • Vowels package movies (with audio): Excerpts from interview

  • Google motion chart (no audio): Whole interview: by-minute averages

  • Google motion chart (no audio): Whole interview: cumulative averages