I'm an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Georgia, where I serve as the Undergraduate Coordinator. I am also faculty at the UGA Institute for Artificial Intelligence. I study spoken language in order to improve our models of speech from both the speaker’s and the listener’s point of view, and I identify as a sociophonetician. My research projects are rooted in the tradition of laboratory phonology, an approach which integrates experimental methods with more abstract linguistic representations of sound structure. I apply phonetic methodologies to socially-informed datasets, to gain insight on topics like the nature of phonological contrast, the realization of phonological rules in everyday speech, the origins of phonological alternations, and the role of phonotactics in speech production and perception. My recent projects include: The acoustics of Southern speech [LVC paper] [JLG GIS paper] [Gazetteer of Southern Vowels] Vowel dynamics [2021 JEngL paper] [2020 JASA paper] [2017 JASA paper] Variation in the Italian vowel space [paper in LabPhon] [paper in Languages] Large-scale corpus studies of English consonants [Phonology paper] [Word Joins] [Audio BNC] The phonetics & phonology of vowels in Romanian [book] [Interspeech paper] Contrast among Catalan vowels [paper in Journal of Phonetics] [paper in Language and Speech] Documentation & preservation of Istrian dialects [NSF grant] Marginal contrast in phonology [LabPhon15 workshop] Most people know me as Peggy. Here's a bit more about me.
