Category: Publications

Article accepted: Prevelar merger in production and perception

1/13/2023

My latest paper on the bag-beg-vague merger in the Pacific Northwest has been accepted to the Journal of Phonetics. The title explains: Production and perception of prevelar merger: Two-dimensional comparisons using Pillai scores and confusion matrices. I've been considering ways to compare the two types of data for a long time, so I'm very pleased with this one. Special thanks to Santiago Barreda for the direction on confusion matrices (and bootstrapping confidence intervals on stats that don't normally provide things like p-values).

Revisions

10/3/2022

This has been a busy few weeks, with three revisions recently submitted to journals:

"Employers’ speech-based first impressions of cochlear implant users," Part 3 of my series on how listeners judge the personalities and competence of cochlear implant users
"Production and perception of prevelar merger: Two-dimensional comparisons using Pillai scores and confusion matrices," which addresses the challenge of comparing continuous vowel production measures with responses from discrete perception tasks
"Dysarthric speech familiarization: Distributed practice and interleaving," spearheaded by Mik Martinelli, former linguistics grad student and now faculty at Midwestern State, and my OSU colleagues Sara Loss and Sabiha Parveen

Part 3 accepted

9/22/2022

Part 3 of a series of experiments about listeners' evaluations of cochlear implant speech has been accepted to the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education. Titled "Employers’ speech-based first impressions of cochlear implant users," hiring managers rated talkers with typical hearing most positively, followed by highly-intelligible CI users and then less-intelligible CI users -- the same patterns as in Parts 1 and 2 (both 2018), which used college students listeners. Listeners didn't know the talkers were deaf. This unconscious bias could have negative effects on deaf/hard-of-hearing employment opportunities.

Three papers submitted

2/24/2022

This has been a busy winter, with three new manuscripts recently submitted to journals:

"Employers’ speech-based first impressions of cochlear implant users," Part 3 of my series on how listeners judge the personalities and competence of cochlear implant users
"Production and perception of prevelar merger: Two-dimensional comparisons using Pillai scores," which addresses the challenge of comparing continuous vowel production measures with responses from discrete perception tasks
"Dysarthric speech familiarization: Distributed practice and interleaving," spearheaded by Mik Martinelli, former linguistics grad student and now faculty at Midwestern State, and my OSU colleagues Sara Loss and Sabiha Parveen

Second remote data collection ("Zoom quality") paper published

8/2/2021

My second article with Paul De Decker in Newfoundland has been published in Language and Linguistics Compass. This journal spans linguistic disciplines to reach a broader audience. This paper compares recordings made on various popular consumer devices (smartphones, laptops, iPad) to professional equipment. Fortunately, vowel patterns are pretty comparable across devices, so researchers can collect audio data from afar, even after the pandemic subsides.

BAG-BEG-BAGEL paper published in LVC

6/30/2021

My paper on the merger of words like BEG and VAGUE, and sometimes BAG, has been published in Language Variation and Change (doi:10.1017/S0954394521000028). I started this project as a student over 7 years ago, but it took a back seat during my dissertation and postdoc until I started revisiting it 3 years ago with some new methods and stats. This paper looks at production (pronunciation) in Seattle, and the next paper will compare production and perception among a slightly wider range of Northwesterners.

First "Zoom quality" article published

2/18/2021

The first journal paper has been published from my summer project with Paul De Decker from Memorial University of Newfoundland: doi: 10.1121/10.0003529. For a JASA special-issue series on effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on acoustic research, we compared vowel and nasalization measurements taken from 3 apps (Zoom, Skype, Teams) with 4 transmission conditions/wifi connection strengths to those taken from professional equipment. Overall, vowel measurements were similar enough for many studies of vowel spaces and mergers, but nasalization measures were less consistent across conditions.

"Zoom Quality" papers submitted & poster accepted to ASA

10/11/2020

When the COVID-19 pandemic halted in-person data collection, my lab and others' turned to video conference call apps like Zoom or asked participants to record themselves on their phones or laptops. To make sure these recordings are suitable for phonetic analysis, I've teamed up with Paul De Decker from Memorial University of Newfoundland, who has previously tested laptops, smartphones, and VoIP apps. This summer, we tested 7 devices, 3 apps, and 4 transmission conditions. Our results on vowel spaces, mergers, and nasalization were accepted as a poster for the Acoustical Society of America fall meeting, which will be online this December. We also recently submitted two papers for a special issue-series about the effects of the pandemic on acoustics and acoustic research practices in the society's journal, JASA.