When people speak, no two voices or utterances are acoustically identical. Speakers manipulate fine phonetic detail in patterned ways, while listeners are highly adept at extracting multiple layers of linguistic and social meaning from the speech signal. Production and perception of variation are integral to human language acquisition, but present challenges for AI systems. 

My research incorporates variation into models of spoken language, to answer questions about the nature of phonological contrast, the origins and realization of phonological patterns, regional accents of US English, and linguistic change across generations. I come to Johns Hopkins from a tenured position in Linguistics at the University of Georgia, and I am a past member of the Phonetics Laboratory at the University of Oxford.  

My work on Southern accents has been featured in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

• AS.001.248 FYS: Who has an accent? Dialects of English
• AS.050.357/675 Sociophonetics