I’m excited to be a keynote speaker at FRIAS Junior Researcher Conference – Human Perspectives on Spoken Human-Machine Interaction this November!
- If you’re interested in submitting a paper to the conference, note the due date of September 3, 2021
Recent posts
New Frontiers paper on Alexa- and human-DS!
Check out my latest Frontiers paper with Georgia Zellou: Prosodic differences in human- and Alexa-directed speech, but similar local intelligibility adjustments
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.675704/
Honorable Mention – 2021 Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research
I am thrilled to be awarded an ‘Honorable Mention’ for the 2021 UC Davis Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research (Postdoc/Grad student category). Congrats to all undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty honored in the ceremony.
https://urc.ucdavis.edu/chancellors-award-excellence-undergraduate-research
New paper accepted to Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
I’m excited that, along with co-authors Georgia Zellou and Tyler Kline, our paper, “The Influence of Conversational Role on Phonetic Alignment toward Voice-AI and Human Interlocutors” has been accepted to Language, Cognition and Neuroscience!
[Update: published May 21st: https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2021.1931372]
New JASA paper on perception of TTS
I’m happy to announce that my paper with co-authors Georgia Zellou and Aleese Block, “Partial compensation for coarticulatory vowel nasalization across concatenative and neural text-to-speech” has been accepted for publication to the Journal of the Acoustic Society of America (JASA) today!
New Frontiers socialbot paper!
We are thrilled that our paper, Speech rate adjustments in conversations with an Amazon Alexa socialbot, has been accepted to Frontiers in Communication, in the special issue ‘Towards Omnipresent and Smart Speech Assistants‘.
2021 UC Davis Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Research
Yesterday, I was thrilled to be awarded the UC Davis Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Research!
2021 Picnic Day Booth: Speech Science
Come learn about an interdisciplinary research project exploring how adults and kids talk to Amazon’s Alexa, compared to how they talk to a human. You’ll see an example of the experiment, meet the team, and get a behind-the-scenes look at the research process!
Interested in participating? http://phonlab.ucdavis.edu/participate
CBS-13 Interview & Press release
Today, UC Davis published a press release and we did an interview with CBS-13 Sacramento on our project, Intelligibility of face-masked speech depends on speaking style: Comparing casual, smiled, and clear speech.
My co-authors, Anne Pycha (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and Georgia Zellou (UC Davis), and I had a blast working together on a new project: how wearing a fabric face mask (as is common these days) affects speech intelligibility.
[Take away: masks don’t simply reduce intelligibility! The speaker plays an important role]
Click here to read the paper in ‘Cognition’
Two posters at LSA 2021
Come see us present two of our projects tomorrow, Saturday, January 9th at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) 2021 Annual Meeting!
Prosodic focus in human- versus voice-AI-directed speech (11-12:30pm)
Eleonora Beier, Michelle Cohn, Fernanda Ferreira, Georgia Zellou
In this study, we test whether speakers differ in how they prosodically mark focus in speech directed toward an adult human versus a voice activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) system (here, Amazon’s Alexa). Overall, we found that speakers prosodically mark focus similarly for both types of interlocutors; this suggests that speakers may view voice-AI (e.g., Alexa) to be a rational listener who will benefit from prosodic focus marking. At the same time, there were several targeted differences by focus type, which suggests that speakers can change their use of prosodic focus marking based on the perceived properties of the listener.
- Selected as a newsworthy project and included in the LSA Press Release
The Interaction between Phonological & Semantic Usage Factors in Dialect Intelligibility in Noise (2-3:30pm)
Riley Stray, Michelle Cohn, & Georgia Zellou
This study examines how an “American” or “British” meaning of a word (e.g., “chips”) spoken in different accents (GB, US) can affect speech-in-noise intelligibility. Overall, we found the British speaker was more intelligible producing British sentences, but also that intelligibility decreased as sentences became more stereotypically British. Results suggest that both phonological and semantic properties of phrases impact speech intelligibility of words across dialects, and that a particular semantic usage in a less familiar dialect can decrease intelligibility as sentences become less predictable.
