Recent posts

Believing Anthropomorphism:  Examining the Role of Anthropomorphic Cues on Trust in Large Language Models

• Michelle Cohn UC Davis, Google Research
• Mahima Pushkarna Google Research
• Gbolahan Olanubi, Google Research
• Joseph Moran Google Research
• Daniel Padgett, Google Research
• Zion Mengesha, Stanford, Google Research
• Courtney Heldreth, Google Research

Do People Mirror Emotion Differently with a Human or TTS Voice? Comparing Listener Ratings and Word Embeddings

• Michelle Cohn, UC Davis
• Grisha Bandodkar, UC Davis
• Raj Bharat Sangani, UC Irvine
• Kristin Predeck, Amazon, UC Davis
• Georgia Zellou, UC Davis

I’m excited to serve on the editorial board for the Speech Section of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (JSLHR) for January-December 2024.

Cohn, M., & Zellou, G. (accepted). Selective tuning of nasal coarticulation and hyperarticulation across clear, casual, and fast speech styles. Journal of Acoustical Society of America (JASA) Express Letters.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/913403/pdf

“Listener beliefs and perceptual learning: Differences
between device and human guises” to appear in Language by Georgia Zellou, Michelle Cohn, Anne Pycha

Thrilled that two of our projects will be presented at LSA in NYC this January!

• Real versus imagined addressees: Prosodic differences across human- and device-directed speech. [Talk] Michelle Cohn, Anne Pycha, Georgia Zellou
• Linguistic Patterning of Laughter in Human-Socialbot Interactions [Poster]. Nynaeve Booker, Michelle Cohn, & Georgia Zellou

Check out the podcast Dr. Georgia Zellou (UCD Linguistics) and I did with UC Davis Unfold Podcast about our research!

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/podcasts-and-shows/unfold/voice-artificial-intelligence

Amy Quinton, Georgia Zellou, & Michelle Cohn in the Unfold Podcast studio at UC Davis

I’m thrilled that two of the Psych PhD students I am helping mentor, Andrea Ramirez and Jenna Distefano, had their projects accepted for a talk and poster at the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) this November!

• Ramirez, A., Cohn, M., & Graf Estes, K. Pitch and repetition in bilingual infant-directed speech [Presentation]

• DiStefano, J., Cohn, M., Zellou, G., & Graf Estes, K. Exploring prosodic variation between contexts in infant-directed speech and its relation to language development [Poster]

I’m excited to share that our paper has been accepted in Frontiers in Computer Science, Human-Media Interaction!

• Comparing alignment toward American, British, and Indian English text-to-speech (TTS) voices: Influence of social attitudes and talker guise; by Nicole Dodd, Michelle Cohn, and Georgia Zellou

This paper is part of a special issue on Voice Assistant Systems in Team Interactions – Implications, Applications, and Future Perspectives

Georgia Zellou and I had a wonderful interview with Amy Quinton, of Unfold Podcast, at UC Davis on June 16th. We shared some of our research on human interactions with voice technology and discussed the implications for speech communication and language more generally. Stay tuned for the podcast!

Along with my co-authors, Ashley Keaton, Jonas Beskow, and Georgia Zellou, we have a new paper accepted in Language Sciences in a special issue “Communication Accommodation Theory at 50: Recent Developments” with Howard Giles!

• Cohn, M., Keaton, K., Beskow, J., & Zellou, G. (accepted). Vocal accommodation to technology: The role of physical form. Language Sciences