Molly Babel - Speech perception and production

Molly Babel is the director of UBC's Speech in Context Lab. Broadly, she is interested in speech perception and production, and there is a strong theme of cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal inquiry in her work. More specifically, her research program focuses on the role of experience and exposure to phonetic and phonological knowledge, how social knowledge may be manifested phonetically, and the mental representation of phonetic and phonological knowledge. A significant portion of her work explores how interacting language systems influence one another on a phonetic level. She has investigated this within bilingual speakers (English and Northern Paiute), across dialects (Australian and New Zealand Englishes), and within dialects (American English). She also has a strong interest in language documentation and description; with colleagues at University of California, Berkeley, she conducted fieldwork on Northern Paiute (Numic; Uto-Aztecan). Note: Apologies for the audio quality in the first ~4 minutes. It improves after that. We are also aiming to upload a video recording of this talk to our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/BCHumanist