Author: Michelle Cohn

I’m very excited that 5 posters were accepted to the UC Davis Undergraduate Research Conference for 10 of my undergraduate mentees across three areas of research:

Speech and cognitive impairment

• [Team poster] Undergrads: Noah Michelson, Kelley Ramirez, Gabi Tapia, Tim Keroles, Quinn Alarcon, Macie Gard, Mars Lake, Faith Orellana: Characterizing Speech Changes Associated with Cognitive Impairment in Autobiographical Narratives.
  • Additional faculty support: Alyssa Weakley, Sarah Tomaszewski Farias, Jet M.J. Vonk, Chen-Nee Chuah, Oanh Meyer, & Georgia Zellou.

• Undergrads: Tim Keroles, Noah Michelson: Exploring Lexical Predictors of Cognitive Impairment and APOE-ε4 Risk.
  • Additional faculty support: Alyssa Weakley, Sarah Tomaszewski Farias, Jet M.J. Vonk, Chen-Nee Chuah, Oanh Meyer, & Georgia Zellou.
• Undergrads: Kelley Ramirez, Noah Michelson: Predicting ASR Word Errors Among Older Adults Varying Cognitive Status and Language.
  • Additional faculty support: Alyssa Weakley, Sarah Tomaszewski Farias, Jet M.J. Vonk, Chen-Nee Chuah, Oanh Meyer, & Georgia Zellou.

Speech perception

• Undergrad: Pranaya Rao Ganta: Anticipatory Vowel Nasalization in California English: Exploring the Production-Perception Link with Eye-Tracking.
  • Additional faculty support: Georgia Zellou

Computational approaches

• Undergrad: Laasya Babbellapati: Examining how Wav2Vec Embeddings Encode Vowel Duration.
  • Additional faculty support: Georgia Zellou

I’m thrilled that along with my co-authors, Alyssa Lanzi, Yui Ishihara, Chen-Nee Chuah, Georgia Zellou, and Alyssa Weakley, our paper “Challenges in Automatic Speech Recognition for Adults with Cognitive Impairment” was accepted to CHI 2026.

I’m thrilled that, along with co-PIs Dr. Alyssa Weakely (UC Davis Neurology) and Dr. Chen-Nee Chuah (UC Davis Computer Science), our grant was one of 6 selected for funding.

Interpretable Acoustic- and LLM-based Cognitive Impairment Detection in Older Adults.

• Lead PI: Cohn. Co-PIs: Chuah & Weakley.

I’m thrilled that my project, along with Georgia Zellou (Prof., UC Davis Linguistics), was one of four grants selected for a Translated Imminent Grant!

Voices We Trust: How L1 and L2 English Speakers Judge LLM Translation Accuracy

• PI: Cohn, Assistant Project Scientist, UC Davis Phonetics Lab, Dept. of Linguistics,
• co-PI Zellou, Professor, UC Davis Phonetics Lab, Dept. of Linguistics 

I’m thrilled to start as a Specialist with the Vonk Lab at the UCSF Fein Memory and Aging Center. I will be working on a project investigating automated speech analyses to probe cognitive impairment.

I gave an invited colloquium for the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Linguistic Department in November, “Impact of AI on Language”.

I’m thrilled to have received a Googler-Initiated Research Gift ($50,000) for my work on anthropomorphism and trust in large language models (LLMs). The next stages of the project will investigate cross-linguistic and cross-cultural factors in these interactions.

I’m thrilled that three of my mentees will be presenting posters at CAMP8 (California Meeting of Psycholinguistics) at UC Davis this weekend!

• “Human vs. ASR perception of Mandarin tones spoken by L1, L2, and heritage speakers” with Jules Vonessen and David Dai
• “Syntax-prosody alignment produced by people and Alexa in conversational speech” with Barb Hlachova

I’m thrilled that two of my undergraduate research mentees, Prati Mehta and Ben Getz (who I’m also co-advising for his Senior Honors Thesis) presented posters at the UC Davis Undergraduate Research Conference on Friday, April 25th!

• Prati Mehta: “Do Wav2vec Embeddings Track Phonetic Differences in Duration?”
• Ben Getz: “Silent Center Syllables: A Study in Coarticulation Across Speech Style and Word Type”

We hosted another event for the UC Davis Take our Children to Work Day at the Phonetics Lab on Thursday, April 24th!

Ages 7-12, Lottery Tours, 10:00am, 11:00am, 12:00pm, 1:00pm, capacity 5 each tour
Participate in a real speech science experiment! Have you ever wondered how you’re able to understand speech? Or how your mouth and tongue coordinate to produce it? Come participate in a real speech science experiment. The appointment is for 45 minutes: the experiment will take about 5 minutes. After, you’ll see a short presentation on our research and have time for kids (and adults!) to ask questions and get a tour of the lab. Participation in the experiment is voluntary; the study has been approved by the UC Davis Institutional Review Board (IRB) ethics committee. 
For more information about consent, go to: https://phonlab.ucdavis.edu/child-consent-participate-experiment-volunteer. Sign up at https://hr.ucdavis.edu/departments/worklife-wellness/events/tocs.