Research interests

In the SpeeCon lab I have primarily been involved with sociophonetic research regarding attractiveness, typicality, phonetic similarity and distance, and the relationship between perception and production. I am also very interested in linguistics fieldwork, language revitalization and documentation, the politics of language and language teaching, as well as language activism. As a recent graduate of UBC I plan on continuing to collaborate with the SpeeCon lab as well as build on my fieldwork training with an eastern Bantu language spoken in Tanzania, Nata, and encourage language activism through radio and web programming. Feel free to contact me about any of these interests or my past research with the lab.

Publications

2014

• Babel, M., McGuire, G., Walters, S., and Nichols, A. (2014). Novelty and social preference in phonetic accommodation.  Journal of Laboratory Phonology .

2013

• Walters, S., Babel, M., and McGuire, G. (2013). The role of voice similarity in accommodation.  Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics .

Presentations

2013

• Babel, M., Haber, G., and Walters, S. (2013). Individual-level connections between perceptual adaptation and phonetic imitation. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Sound Change Actuation, University of Chicago.

2012

• Babel, M., McGuire, G., Nichols, A., and Walters, S. (2012). Imitation as a mechanism for the spread of sound change. In Proceedings of the Second Annual Workshop on Sound Change, Seeon-Seebruck, Germany.
• Babel, M., McGuire, G., Nichols, A., and Walters, S. (2012). Imitation of individual voices varying in attractiveness and stereotypicality. In Proceedings of the Conference on Sources of Individual Differences, Ottawa, Canada.