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.
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
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!
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!
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.
We had a wonderful time hosting our Speech Science booth at UC Davis Picnic Day! Adults and kids could learn about spectrograms and try a bot / not experiment.
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.Â
Michelle Cohn 