News

Language Variation and Change Paper

8/30/2021

Perceptual validation of vowel normalization methods for variationist research. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394521000016

New Frontiers in Com. Paper

8/30/2021

Prosodic differences in human- and Alexa-directed speech, but similar local intelligibility adjustments. doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.675704

Congrats to Dr. Georgia Zellou, postdoc Michelle Cohn, and graduate student Tyler Kline for their paper, "The influence of conversational role on phonetic alignment toward voice-AI and human interlocutors" published in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience (LCN) today!

New JASA paper on text-to-speech voices

5/21/2021

Congrats to Dr. Georgia Zellou, postdoc Michelle Cohn, and graduate student Aleese Block for their paper, "Partial compensation for coarticulatory vowel nasalization across concatenative and neural text-to-speech", published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) today!

New socialbot paper in Frontiers!

4/21/2021

Congrats to postdoc, Michelle Cohn, research coordinator Melina Sarian and Dr. Georgia Zellou for their new paper in Frontiers in Communication: Speech rate adjustments in conversations with an Amazon Alexa socialbot, in the special issue ‘Towards Omnipresent and Smart Speech Assistants‘.

UC Davis Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral research

3/31/2021

Congrats to the two NSF postdoctoral fellows in the Phonetics Lab for being nominated for (Dr. Kayla Palakurthy) and awarded (Dr. Michelle Cohn) the UC Davis Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Research.

Congratulations Dr. Michelle Cohn for winning the Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Research. Announced by the Associate Dean Dr. Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor at the 6th Annual Postdoctoral Research Symposium of @ucdavis PSA.@UCDavisGrad
@UCDGradPostdoc @waleos pic.twitter.com/u24SmnWeHp
— UC Davis Postdocs (@UCDavisPostdocs) March 31, 2021

Press coverage for face-masked speech project

3/18/2021

Intelligibility of face-masked speech depends on speaking style: Comparing casual, smiled, and clear speech. (Cohn, Pycha & Zellou, 2021). Click here to read the paper in 'Cognition'

CBS 58 Milwaukee On-Air News Segment [article/video]. "Researchers look at how masks impact communication (3/18/21)

Equinox [article] "Unmask Masked Speech" (3/6/21)

US News & World Report [article] “As Mask-Wearing Prevails, People Are Adapting to Understanding Speech” (2/8/21)

Ladders [article] “This is how you can make masked conversations 100% more successful” (2/8/21)

WFMY Greensboro On-Air News Segment [article] [video] “What did you say? How masks affect your communication & understanding” (2/4/21)

KCBS San Francisco (106.9FM AND 740AM) Live Interview with Rebecca Corral [article] [recording] "UC Davis conducts study on how wearing a mask affects our speech patterns” (2/3/21)

CBS-13 Sacramento On-Air News Segment [article] [video] “UC Davis Study Finds Face Masks Do Not Impact Ability To Communicate” (2/2/21)
UC Davis Press Release [article] “Speaking and Listening Seem More Difficult in a Masked World, But People Are Adapting” (2/2/21)

Feb 4., 2021 WFMY coverage of our 'Cognition' paper. They did an "experiment" to test if listeners could tell if the host was wearing a mask or not.

CBS-13 Sacramento covered our recent face-masked speech paper on Feb. 2, 2021

LSA Annual Meeting (2021) Talks

1/10/2021

Congrats to the grad and undergrad students for their presentations at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).

Aleese Block: "Cue weighting and phoneme-specific patterns in systems of quantity contrast: the case of Norwegian vowels"

Kristin Predeck, Aleese Block "Problematic phonemes” and German /ɛ:/: An acoustic analysis"

Eleonora Beier, Michelle Cohn, Fernanda Ferreira, & Georgia Zellou: "Prosodic focus in human- versus voice-AI-directed speech"
- Selected as a newsworthy project and included in the LSA Press Release

Riley Stray, Michelle Cohn, Georgia Zellou: "The Interaction between Phonological and Semantic Usage Factors in Dialect Intelligibility in Noise"

Cognition paper on face-masked speech

12/23/2020

"Intelligibility of face-masked speech depends on speaking style: Comparing casual, clear, and emotional speech"
by postdoc Michelle Cohn (UC Davis), Anne Pycha (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and Georgia Zellou (UC Davis)
Recently published in Cognition: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0010027720303899

[Take away: fabric face-masks don’t simply reduce intelligibility! The speaker plays an important role]

New Frontiers paper on voice-AI!

12/21/2020

We are thrilled that our paper, Age- and gender-related differences in speech alignment toward humans and voice-AI, has been accepted at Frontiers in Communication: Language Sciences today!

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2020.600361/abstract

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