Lab directors

Molly Babel
Lab Director
Molly.Babel@ubc.ca

 

Research interest

Broadly, I am interested in speech perception and production, and there is a strong theme of cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal inquiry in my work. More specifically, my 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 my work explores how interacting language systems influence one another on a phonetic level. I have investigated this within bilingual speakers (English and Northern Paiute), across dialects (Australian and New Zealand Englishes), and within dialects (American English). I also have a strong interest in language documentation and description; with colleagues at University of California,Berkeley, I conducted fieldwork on Northern Paiute (Numic; Uto-Aztecan).

Publications

 

2016

  • Abel, J., and Babel, M. (2016). Cognitive Load Reduces Perceived Linguistic Convergence Between Dyads.  Language and Speech .
  • McAuliffe, M., Babel, M., and Vaughn, C. (2016). Do listeners learn better from natural speech?. INTERSPEECH , 1-4.
  • Szakay, A., Babel, M., and King, J. (2016). Social categories are shared across bilinguals’ lexicons. Journal of Phonetics .
  • 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.
  • Babel, M., and Russell, J. (2015). Expectations and Speech Intelligibility.  Journal of the Acoustical Society of America .
  • McGuire, G., and Babel, M. (2015). Facial attractiveness facilitates face processing.  Proceedings of the International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences , 1-4. PDF
  • Babel, M., and McGuire, G. (2015). Perceptual Fluency and Judgments of Vocal Aesthetics and Stereotypicality.  Cognitive Science .
  • Babel, M., and McGuire, G. (2015). The effects of talker variability on phonetic accommodation. Proceedings of the International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences , 1-5.

2014

  • Babel, M., McGuire, G., Walters, S., and Nichols, A. (2014). Novelty and social preference in phonetic accommodation.  Journal of Laboratory Phonology .
  • Babel, M., McGuire, G., and King, J. (2014). Towards a More Nuanced View of Vocal Attractiveness.  PLOS ONE .

2013

  • Babel, M., McAuliffe, M., and Haber, G. (2013). Can mergers-in-progress be unmerged in speech accommodation?.  Frontiers in Psychology .
  • Babel, M., Garrett, A., Houser, M., and Toosarvandani, M. (2013). Descent and diffusion in language diversification: A study of Western Numic dialectology .  International Journal of American Linguistics .
  • Babel, M., and McGuire, G. (2013). Listener expectations and gender bias in nonsibilant fricative perception.  Phonetica .
  • Babel, M., and McGuire, G. (2013). Perceived vocal attractiveness across dialects is similar but not uniform.  Proceedings of Interspeech .
  • Babel, M., and Munson, B. (in press). Producing socially meaninful linguistic variation.  The Oxford Handbook of Language Production, V. Ferreira, M. Goldrick, and M. Miozza (Eds). .
  • McGuire, G., Russell, J., and Babel, M. (2013). The effect of accommodation on perceived vocal aesthetics.  Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics .
  • Walters, S., Babel, M., and McGuire, G. (2013). The role of voice similarity in accommodation. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics .

2012

  • McGuire, G., and Babel, M. (2012). A cross-modal account for synchronic and diachronic patterns of /f/ and /θ/ in English.  Journal of Laboratory Phonology .
  • Babel, M. (2012). Evidence for phonetic and social selectivity in phonetic accommodation.  Journal of Phonetics .
  • Babel, M., and McGuire, G. (2012). Gendered sound symbolism and masking effects in speech processing.  Proceedings of Interspeech . PDF
  • Babel, M., Houser, M., and Toosarvandani, M. (2012). Phonetic Description of Mono Lake Northern Paiute.  Journal of the International Phonetic Alphabet .
  • McAuliffe, M., and Babel, M. (2012). Predictability affects vowel dispersion and dynamics in the Buckeye Corpus.  Proceedings of Interspeech .
  • Szakay, A., Babel, M., and King, J. (2012). Sociophonetic markers facilitate translation priming: Maori English GOAT — A different kind of animal.  Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics .
  • Babel, M., and Bulatov, D. (2012). The role of fundamental frequency in phonetic accommodation. Language and Speech .

2011

  • Babel, M. (2011). Imitation in Speech.  Acoustics Today . PDF

2010

  • Babel, M., and Johnson, K. (2010). Accessing psycho-acoustic perception with speech sounds. Journal of Laboratory Phonology .
  • Babel, M. (2010). Dialect convergence and divergence in New Zealand English.  Language in Society .
  • Johnson, K., and Babel, M. (2010). On the perceptual basis of distinctive features: Evidence from the perception of fricatives by Dutch and English speakers.  Journal of Phonetics .

2009

  • Babel, M. (2009). The phonetics and phonology of obsolescence in Northern Paiute.  Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages, Eds., D. Preston and J. Stanford .

2007

  • Babel, M., and Johnson, K. (2007). Cross-linguistic differences in the perception of palatalization. Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences . PDF
  • Munson, B., and Babel, M. (2007). Loose lips and silver tongues, or projecting sexual orientation through speech.  Language and Linguistic Compass .

2005

  • Munson, B., and Babel, M. (2005). The sequential cueing effect in children’s speech production. Applied Psycholinguistics .