Recent posts

UC Davis Picnic Day: Speech Science Booth

The UC Davis Phonetics Lab and Language Learning Lab hosted our Speech Science booth at the 2024 UC Davis Picnic Day on Saturday, April 20th at the Children’s Discovery Fair!

I organized the booth and activities: we had spectrograms / waveforms that adults & kids could circle to learn about the components of speech, as well as a ‘Bot or Not’ experiment they could try to determine if speakers were text-to-speech (TTS) or human voices.

Paper accepted to JASA-EL Special Issue on Human/Machine Speech Interaction

Thrilled that our paper was accepted to the Journal of Acoustical Society of America Express Letters (JASA-EL) Special Issue: Acoustic Cue–Based Perception and Production of Speech by Humans and Machines:

Cohn, M., Mengesha, Z., Lahav, M., & Heldreth, C. African American English speakers’ pitch variation and rate adjustments for imagined technological and human addressees”

2 papers accepted to late-breaking CHI

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

Talk + poster on human-computer interaction accepted for presentations @ LSA 2024

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