Recent posts

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

We’re thrilled that our paper, “The effect of listener beliefs on perceptual learning: Comparing adaptation to a vowel shift across device and human guises”, by Georgia Zellou, myself, and Anne Pycha, has been accepted for publication at Language.

We have a new paper accepted to Interspeech 2023, “Cross-linguistic Emotion Perception in Human and TTS Voices”, led by Iona Gessinger, and our co-authors Georgia Zellou, Bernd Möbius, and Benjamin Cowan.

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 to the UC Davis Phonetics Lab (Department of Linguistics), 251 Kerr Hall to directly participate in a real speech science experiment (ages 7-12).

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.

Timeslots: 10am, 11am, 1pm [RSVP required]. Note that we can accommodate a maximum of 5 children for each time slot.

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.

To sign up and to learn more about the Take our Children to Work events, please go to: https://hr.ucdavis.edu/departments/worklife-wellness/events/tocs.