I was thrilled to be invited as this year’s Yvonne Becker Colloquium Speaker in the Department of Linguistics at Simon Fraser University (May 30, 12:30pm – 2:00pm).
Title: Impact of AI on human language
Abstract: Millions of people now talk to voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) systems (e.g., Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, ChatGPT) to complete daily tasks. My research program tests how people (1) talk to, (2) perceive, and (3) learn language from voice-AI. At its core, I ask: is communication with voice-AI similar/distinct from communication with another human? I design experiments to probe behavior, combining methods from psycholinguistics, human-computer interaction, and phonetics. Thus far, I have found that while people produce a distinct technology-directed register, they also attribute human social qualities to the systems (e.g., gender, emotion) and learn speech patterns from them. I discuss these findings in terms of their implications for linguistic diversity and language change.
Michelle Cohn 