As a speech scientist based on California, I have grown interested in patterns of regional dialect variation in both shaping production and perception of speech.
Variation in /æ/ (e.g., “bad” vs. “ban”) within California
- Brotherton, Cohn, Zellou, Barreda (2019) : We found differences in extent of raising, nasalization, and diphthongization of /æ/ in Southern, Northern, and Central California.
- We presented this work at the 2019 International Phonetic Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) in Melbourne, Australia.
Top-down effect of speaker age on perception
- Zellou, Cohn, & Block (2020): We tested differences based on compensation for coarticulation for /u/ fronting based on speaker age guise
- We’ve presented this work at 2019 CAMP3 in Santa Cruz and at the 2020 Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting.
Michelle Cohn 