Research interests

My primary research interests are in the realms of phonetics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. My current research program is focused on the variation in speech, specifically looking at how listeners accommodate speaker variation and how variable the realization of a word can be across conversational speech. My dissertation research focuses on the listener side of variation, using manipulations within a perceptual learning paradigm.

Publications

2016

• McAuliffe, M., Babel, M., and Vaughn, C. (2016). Do listeners learn better from natural speech?.  INTERSPEECH , 1-4.
• McAuliffe, M., and Babel, M. (2016). Stimulus-directed attention attenuates lexically-guided perceptual learning.  Journal of the Acoustical Society of America .

2015

• McAuliffe, M., and Babel, M. (2015). Attention, word position, and perceptual learning.  Proceedings of the International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences , 1-4. PDF

2013

• Babel, M., McAuliffe, M., and Haber, G. (2013). Can mergers-in-progress be unmerged in speech accommodation?.  Frontiers in Psychology .

2012

• McAuliffe, M., and Babel, M. (2012). Predictability affects vowel dispersion and dynamics in the Buckeye Corpus.  Proceedings of Interspeech .

Presentations

2014

• Babel, M., McAuliffe, M., and McGuire, G. (2014). Spectral similarity and listener judgments of phonetic accommodation. In Proceedings of the 10th International Seminar on Speech Production, Cologne, Germany.
• McAuliffe, M., and Babel, M. (2014). Toward a holistic measure of reduction in spontaneous speech. In Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, Tokyo, Japan.

2012

• Babel, M., McAuliffe, M., and Narayan, C. (2012). Linguistic effects on talker discrimination: The effect of semantic cohesion. In Proceedings of the Laboratory Phonology 13, Stuttgart, Germany.
• McAuliffe, M., and Babel, M. (2012). Predictability affects vowel dispersion and dynamics in the Buckeye Corpus. In Proceedings of the Interspeech, Portland, Oregon.
• Babel, M., Haber, G., and McAuliffe, M. (2012). Unmerging mergers-in-progress through spontaneous phonetic imitation. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Imitation and Convergence in Speech, Aix-en-Provence, France.