News

Congratulations to Georgia Zellou for being selected as a 2024 Chancellor's Fellow, "a title given to early career academics doing exemplary work".

Full article:

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/new-chancellors-fellows-make-even-200

Congrats to Santiago Barreda and PhonLab alum, Kris Predeck, for publishing a paper in the Journal of Phonetics:

• Barreda, S., & Predeck, K. (2024). Inaccurate but predictable: Vocal-tract length estimation and gender stereotypes in height perception. Journal of Phonetics 1 (1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101290

Congrats to Georgia Zellou and her co-author, Mohamed Lahrouchi (CNRS & Université Paris 8) for publishing their paper in Scientific Reports:

• Zellou, G., & M Lahrouchi, M. (2024). Linguistic disparities in cross-language automatic speech recognition transfer from Arabic to Tashlhiyt. Scientific Reports 14 (1), 313. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-50516-3

Congratulations to grad student, Nicholas Aoki, who was one of the winners of the POMA Student Paper Competition from the 184th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA). As part of his award, he was featured on Across Acoustics, the official podcast of the Acoustical Society of America!

Research from the PhonLab was well represented at the 2024 LSA Annual meeting in NYC! Five abstracts were accepted for oral or poster presentations! 

Congrats to Georgia Zellou, postdoc Michelle Cohn, and Anne Pycha (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) for publishing their paper in Language:

• Zellou, G., Cohn, M., & Pycha, A. (2023). Listener beliefs and perceptual learning: Differences
  between device and human guises. Language 99 (4). https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914191

UCD PhonLab PhD student Nicholas Aoki has been selected as a winner of the POMA Student Paper Competition for his paper and presentation at the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) Chicago Meeting titled “When clear speech does not enhance memory: Effects of speaking style, voice naturalness, and listener age.” https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0001766

Professor Georgia Zellou and postdoc Michelle Cohn were interviewed by Amy Quinton, of Unfold Podcast, at UC Davis on June 16th. They shared some of their research on human interactions with voice technology and discussed the implications for speech communication and language more generally. 

The full podcast is now out! 

Congratulations to PhD student, Nicole Dodd, postdoc Michelle Cohn, and Professor Georgia Zellou for their paper, Comparing alignment toward American, British, and Indian English text-to-speech (TTS) voices: Influence of social attitudes and talker guise, accepted to Frontiers in Computer Science (Human-Media Interaction)!

We hosted families at the UC Davis Phonetics Lab for the 2023 Take Our Children to Work Day on April 27th. Children and adults participated in a real speech science experiment and learned more about the research we do at the PhonLab! Thanks to all who visited!