This year's Picnic Day is going 100% digital in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, a small team of talented RAs (Patty Sandoval, Julian Rambob, Mia Gong, and Marlene Andrade) helped postdoc Michelle Cohn create videos for our Virtual Picnic Day Booths! 

Hosted by the Voice-AI Speech Research Group in the UC Davis Phonetics Lab, Dept. of Linguistics

Hosted by the UC Davis Human-Device Interaction Group: UCD Natural Language Processing (NLP) Lab (Computer Science), UCD Phonetics Lab (Linguistics) 

See the other Virtual Picnic Day events here!

As part of Virtual Picnic Day, we are launching online studies that you and your family can participate in from home! 

• Go to our 'Participate' page for more information
• We have short studies for adult and kids (ages 7-12) to try!
• We have a kid-friendly post-experiment video that will explain what we were testing! A great educational activity for kids while they're inside for the quarantine!

​Congrats to Ph.D. student Kristin (Kris) Predeck for being awarded the 2020-2021 Provost's Dissertation Year Fellowship!

New paper out by Dr. Georgia Zellou, Dr. Santiago Barreda, and Ph.D. student Bruno Ferenc Segedin. You can read it here: https://asa.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1121/10.0000951?download=true. 

Congratulations to Aleese Block, Ph.D. student, for being awarded a year-long research grant through American-Scandinavian Foundation!

Call for RAs: Alexa- vs. human-directed speech project (Dr. Michelle Cohn, UCD Phonetics Lab)

Postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Michelle Cohn, is recruiting undergraduate research assistants (RAs) to serve as confederates in the Alexa- (Amazon Echo) vs. human-directed speech project for Spring 2020 (with possibility of a paid STDT 2 position in Summer 2020 and LIN 199 units in Fall 2020).

RAs are expected to work approximately 6-8 hours a week on the project and will receive 2 units of LIN 199 credit per quarter (Note that 4 units count as upper division elective toward LIN major). 

Details (Spring Qtr 2020):

• Act as a confederate in an interactive psycholinguistic experiment 
• Will receive 2 units of LIN199 (6-8 hours / week) 
• Attend lab meetings (if possible)

The project: Alexa- vs. human-directed speech

• We are comparing how adults and children talk to Amazon's Alexa compared to a real human (you!). There will be both scripted and open ended interactions between you and the participants (and they will complete the same tasks with Alexa). Note that the scripted portion will not require memorization. 

​Requirements: 

• Since 'Alexa' has apparent social characteristics ('female', native English speaker), we are aiming to match those properties in our confederates. At this time, we’re seeking only female native English speakers. 

Desired qualifications

• Interest in research! (Prior experience not required) 
• Be a Linguistics or Cognitive Science Major
• Enthusiastic and interested in talking to new people

Application deadline: March 8, 2020 (by midnight PST)
To apply, email the following to the project PI, Dr. Cohn (mdcohn@ucdavis.edu): 

• CV / Resume
• Unofficial academic transcripts
• 1-2 paragraph description of your interest in the RA position (why do you want to be an RA? Why do you think you'll be a good fit?) 
• Spring 2020 course schedule 

Next steps: 

• After receiving your application, we may offer you an interview with the project PI (Dr. Michelle Cohn).
• Training will begin the first week of Spring quarter 2020. 

Congrats to Dr. Georgia Zellou for getting tenure! 

Congratulations to Dr. Georgia Zellou for being inducted as a Fellow into the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) at the 2020 annual meeting. She was honored for her dedication to the field as a co-director of the 2019 LSA Summer Institute hosted at UC Davis. 

Great job to Ph.D students Aleese Block, Tyler Kline, and Bruno Ferenc Segedin for presenting at the 2020 Linguistic Society of America annual Meeting in New Orleans!

Come join the lab!

​The Phonetics Lab is recruiting applications for undergraduate research assistant (RAs) positions for Winter 2020 - Spring 2020 (with possibility of extension). RAs are expected to work approximately 6-8 hours a week in the lab and will receive 2 units of LIN 199 credit per quarter (4 units count as upper division elective toward LIN major). 
 
RAs will:

• Get hands-on experience with running experiments in the lab 
• Schedule and run subjects independently
• Use tools for automatic acoustic analysis
• Act as a confederate in interactive experiments
• Use Praat to annotate / measure acoustic properties of speech data
• Receive 2 units of 199 (Research) per quarter

Desired qualifications

• Interest in research! (Prior experience not required) 
• Background in acoustic phonetics / linguistics 

Application deadline: December 11, 2019 (by midnight PST)
 
To apply, email the following to research coordinator, Melina Sarian (msarian@ucdavis.edu): 

1. CV / Resume
2. Unofficial academic transcripts
3. 1-2 paragraph description of your interest in the RA position (why do you want to be an RA? Why do you think you'll be a good fit?) 
4. Winter 2020 course schedule