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

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)!

Congratulations to Drs. Georgia Zellou, Michelle Cohn, and Anne Pycha for paper, “The effect of listener beliefs on perceptual learning: Comparing adaptation to a vowel shift across device and human guises”, accepted for publication at Language.

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!

The UC Davis Phonetics Lab and Language Learning Lab hosted a joint Speech Science Booth at this year's Picnic Day, a campus-wide open house. Children and adults tried examples of experiments and learned about how we produce, perceive, and learn speech patterns. Thanks to all who came by the booth and our fantastic group of postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduate research assistants who helped out! 

Congratulations to PhonLab grad student, Dr. Aleese Block, for filing her dissertation, Cue weighting and enhancement in systems of contrast: vowel quantity in Norwegian. 

We are thrilled that Dr. Block has accepted a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for the Phonetic Sciences at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.
 

The lab has a new paper now in press in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (JSLHR) by Michelle Cohn, Santiago Barreda, & Georgia Zellou: "Differences in a Musician's Advantage for Speech-in-Speech Perception Based on Age and Task". [doi.org/10.1044/2022_JSLHR-22-00259]

Congrats to Georgia Zellou, Anne Pycha, & Michelle Cohn for their recently accepted paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA): "The perception of nasal coarticulatory variation in face-masked speech". [https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0017257]

We are thrilled to have a fantastic new cohort of undergraduate research assistants (RAs) helping on a variety of PhonLab projects. 

• Grisha Bandodkar
• Nishchala Beeram
• Benjamin Getz
• Mercedes Herrrera
• Lauren Kim
• Mira Kren
• Jasmine Muñoz
• Elizabeth Tedrow
• Alexander Tse

Five talks by several PhonLab members at the Annual Linguistics Society of America (LSA) conference in Denver:

1. Register adaptations toward Alexa: Comparing children and adults; Michelle Cohn, Santiago Barreda, Katharine Graf Estes, Zhou Yu, & Georgia Zellou

2. Perceptually-motivated influences on nasal coarticulatory variation in French; Georgia Zellou & Ioana Chitoran

3. Non-uniform scaling of formant patterns is phonetically salient; Santiago Barreda