Recent News

April 3, 2023

I'll be joining the Linguistics Department at the University of Kansas as a tenure-track Assistant Professor!

March 18-19, 2023

Some of my undergraduate students and I will be presenting at the Penn Linguistics conference. Our talk, which began as a course project last semester, is on "Novel and changing social evaluations of all-lowercase and exclamation points."

November 18, 2022

I'm excited to announce that Andrea Beltrama and I will be co-teaching a course on "Language, Social Stereotypes, and Cognition" at the 2023 LSA Summer Institute at UMass Amherst. I hope I'll see you there!

October 14, 2022

I presented my plans for my next big project on "Growing experience and changing sociolinguistic knowledge," which will look at perception, production, and social evaluations of transplants to a new dialect region. Thanks NWAV 50 for the helpful feedback!

April 8, 2022

Come meet the author (Me!) on April 8th for the LSA's "Meet the Author" webinar series. I'll be talking about my recent Language paper "Experimental evidence for expectation-driven linguistic convergence."

March 22, 2022

My paper, "Experimental Evidence for Expectation-Driven Linguistic Convergence," based on my dissertation work, is out this month in Language.

October 21, 2021

I'll be giving two talks at NWAV49: "A hierarchical clustering approach to continuing and reversing sound changes," with Meredith Tamminga and "The role of dialect background in expectation-driven shifts in perception and production," based on a replication of my dissertation work.

March 1, 2021

My paper with Wei Lai and Meredith Tamminga, "Individual differences in simultaneous perceptual compensation for coarticulatory and lexical cues," has been accepted at Linguistics Vanguard.

August 10, 2020

My paper "The Reliability of Individual Differences in VOT Imitation" with Wei Lai and Meredith Tamminga is now out.

July 10, 2020

My paper "Perceptual Learning, Talker Specificity, and Sound Change" with Meredith Tamminga, Robert Wilder, and Wei Lai, is now out in Papers in Historical Phonology.

July 1, 2020

I started my new position as a postdoc in Meredith Tamminga's Language Variation and Cognition Lab at Penn. We are working on understanding how multiple variants cluster together in speech production, using machine learning methods like agglomerative hierarchical clustering, as well as how variant clusters are mentally represented and linked to social meaning.

April 24, 2020

I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation, entitled "The Linguistic and the social intertwined: Linguistic convergence toward Southern speech"

April 3, 2020

My paper with Gareth Roberts, "Linguistic Convergence to Observed Versus Expected Behavior in an Alien‐Language Map Task" is now out in Cognitive Science.

January 5, 2020

I presented some of my dissertation research showing that "Speakers converge toward variants they haven't heard: The case of Southern monophthongal /ay/" at the LSA annual meeting.

October 10, 2019

Wei Lai will be presenting on Tamminga, Wade & Lai: "The search for predictors of individual differences in VOT imitation." I'll be presenting a talk on my project with Gareth Roberts: "Accommodation to observed vs. expected behavior in a laboratory experiment"

June 17, 2019

I was awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant for my dissertation, "Linguistic Accommodation to Southern Speech"

April 11, 2019

I will be giving a brownbag talk, "Speakers converge to linguistic variants they don’t hear: The case of the Southern /ay/ vowel," for the UPenn Social and Behavioral Sciences Initiative.

December 18, 2018

I successfully defended the proposal for my dissertation, "Linguistic Accommodation to Southern Speech"

November 26, 2018

I was awarded a grant for my project on convergence to southern speech, from the UPenn Social and Behavioral Sciences Initiative.

October 12, 2018

My Co-Editor Jordan Kodner and I are happy to announce that Penn Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV 46 has been published.