About

We study how children and adults learn how to speak in ways that convey their social identity, and how they perceive social and personal identity through speech and language. We study this in numerous ways and in numerous groups: adults with and without hearing loss, and children with and without.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Linguistics
• Social psychology
• Law
• Gender studies
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Racial Identity Perception, Social Affiliation, and Sentence Repetition in Children

  Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research · 2026-03-13

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  PURPOSE: Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) often use sentence repetition (SR) tasks to screen children for language disorders. The influence of talker-specific sociolinguistic factors on SR performances in children remains unexplored. This study examined the influence of two sociolinguistic variables on SR task performance: whether the children's racial identity matched that of the person being repeated and whether the children perceived themselves to be socially affiliated with the person being repeated. METHOD: A total of 134 four- to 8-year-old children (55 boys and 79 girls) were tested at two public events. Each child completed an SR task with prompts produced by a Black, East Asian, and White talker and answered three questions about their perceived social affiliation with each talker. Generalized logit mixed-effects models were used to examine the relationship among predictor variables of age, racial identity match, and perceived social affiliation and the outcome variable of SR accuracy. RESULTS: Overall, 67% of sentences were repeated back accurately. The Black talker and the East Asian talker were associated with more accurate SR compared to the White talker. A match between the racial identity of the child and the talker was associated with lower SR scores. No significant effect was found between SR scores and social affiliation questions. Age was a consistent predictor of SR scores; however, no evidence was found for the interaction terms with either racial identity or social affiliation questions. CONCLUSIONS: The differences in SR accuracy across the three talkers suggest the potential for clinically significant differences depending on which talkers are used in assessing SR. More diverse child samples and talker samples are needed to rigorously assess the hypothesis that racial match or mismatch affects SR accuracy. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.31446301.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Perceptual Ratings Predict Speech Inversion Articulatory Kinematics in Childhood Speech Sound Disorders

  Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research · 2026-02-04 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  PURPOSE: This study evaluated whether articulatory kinematics, inferred by articulatory phonology speech inversion neural networks, aligned with perceptual ratings of /ɹ/ and /s/ in the speech of children with speech sound disorders. METHOD: Articulatory phonology vocal tract variables were inferred for 5,961 utterances from 118 children and three adults, aged 2.25-45 years. Perceptual ratings were standardized using the novel 5-point PERCEPT Rating Scale and training protocol. Two research questions examined if the articulatory patterns of inferred vocal tract variables aligned with the perceptual error category for the phones investigated (e.g., tongue tip is more anterior in dentalized /s/ productions than in correct /s/). A third research question examined if gradient PERCEPT Rating Scale scores predicted articulatory proximity to correct productions. RESULTS: Estimated marginal means from linear mixed models supported 17 of 18 /ɹ/ hypotheses, involving tongue tip and tongue body constrictions. For /s/, estimated marginal means from a second linear mixed model supported seven of 15 hypotheses, particularly those related to the tongue tip. A third linear mixed model revealed that PERCEPT Rating Scale scores significantly predicted articulatory proximity of errored phones to correct productions. CONCLUSIONS: Inferred vocal tract variables differentiated category and magnitude of articulatory errors for /ɹ/, and to a lesser extent for /s/, aligning with perceptual judgments. These findings support the clinical interpretability of speech inversion vocal tract variables and the PERCEPT Rating Scale in quantifying articulatory proximity to the target sound, particularly for /ɹ/. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.31152061.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Perceptual Ratings Predict Speech Inversion Articulatory Kinematics in Childhood Speech Sound Disorders

  ArXiv.org · 2025-07-02

  preprintOpen access

  Purpose: This study evaluated whether articulatory kinematics, inferred by Articulatory Phonology speech inversion neural networks, aligned with perceptual ratings of /r/ and /s/ in the speech of children with speech sound disorders. Methods: Articulatory Phonology vocal tract variables were inferred for 5,961 utterances from 118 children and 3 adults, aged 2.25-45 years. Perceptual ratings were standardized using the novel 5-point PERCEPT Rating Scale and training protocol. Two research questions examined if the articulatory patterns of inferred vocal tract variables aligned with the perceptual error category for the phones investigated (e.g., tongue tip is more anterior in dentalized /s/ productions than in correct /s/). A third research question examined if gradient PERCEPT Rating Scale scores predicted articulatory proximity to correct productions. Results: Estimated marginal means from linear mixed models supported 17 of 18 /r/ hypotheses, involving tongue tip and tongue body constrictions. For /s/, estimated marginal means from a second linear mixed model supported 7 of 15 hypotheses, particularly those related to the tongue tip. A third linear mixed model revealed that PERCEPT Rating Scale scores significantly predicted articulatory proximity of errored phones to correct productions. Conclusion: Inferred vocal tract variables differentiated category and magnitude of articulatory errors for /r/, and to a lesser extent for /s/, aligning with perceptual judgments. These findings support the clinical interpretability of speech inversion vocal tract variables and the PERCEPT Rating Scale in quantifying articulatory proximity to the target sound, particularly for /r/.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Perception of (Trans)masculinity in Speech: Effects of Acoustic Characteristics and Rater Identity

  Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research · 2025-07-17 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Purpose: Gender-affirming communication services are based on studies of speech produced and perceived by cisgender men and women. The current study examined the perception of gender and gender orientation (i.e., whether someone is cisgender or transgender) in the Palette of Voices, an openly available corpus of the speech of transgender and cisgender men, by cisgender heterosexual men (CHM) and cisgender heterosexual women (CHF), and a group of gender and sexuality expansive (GSE) listeners. We examined how both the acoustic characteristics of speech and listener identity affect gender and gender orientation categorization. Method: Participants ( n = 199) categorized the gender and gender orientation of 240 sentence productions produced by 20 male talkers in an online experiment, including tokens whose fundamental frequency ( F 0) and formant frequency scaling had been altered, and unmanipulated tokens. Results: Consistent with previous research, productions with lower F 0 and lower formant frequencies were more likely to be categorized as male than ones with higher F 0s and formants. The weighting of these variables differed systematically across listener groups, with the GSE group weighting these variables less than the CHM and CHF groups when categorizing gender, but more when categorizing gender orientation. Conclusions: The relationship between the acoustic characteristics of a talker's speech and the categorization of their gender and gender orientation is highly variable across and within groups. The perception data and speech samples in this study are openly available. Suggestions are given for how they might be used to supplement existing gender-affirming communication services.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A preliminary investigation into the acoustic variability of examiners' productions in language assessments

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2025-05-01

  article

  Speech-language pathologists often use live-voice assessments to identify communication disorders in children. This study investigated the median F0, F0 range, and speaking rate of 12 examiners administering a commonly used sentence repetition assessment to 151 children aged from three to nine years. Results demonstrated that the acoustic characteristics differed between examiners and suggested that variation in these characteristics is associated with the child's age. Further research is needed to understand how variability in examiners' speech characteristics could potentially impact children's performance in language tasks.

  PublisherDOI

• Acoustic characteristics of speech-language pathologists’ productions based on perceived age and language ability of the listener

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2025-04-01

  articleSenior author

  Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) administer assessments to determine whether children have communication disorders. Although these assessments specify procedures to ensure comparable administration across examiners, there are still individual factors that are unaccounted for. A commonly used measure is sentence repetition, in which a child repeats a live-voice production of a sentence. Live-administered sentence repetition tasks can be affected by individual differences in prosody used by the talker, particularly their rate of speech and F0 patterns. In this study, we investigated SLPs’ rate and F0 deviation as they administered a sentence repetition task to an adult and four different hypothetical children: two 3-year-olds and two 12-year-olds who are described as having developmental language disorder (DLD) or not. We conducted an online study in which SLPs produced 16 sentences, which were either taken from the Redmond Sentence Recall (Redmond, 2005) or newly developed syntactically similar sentences. For each production of a child-directed sentence, we measured the rate of speech and F0 deviation and compared those to their adult-directed productions. The results indicate the degree to which individual SLPs adapt their speech for various hypothetical children. A post-survey question suggests differing philosophies on the appropriateness of adapting speech to individual children during assessment administration.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond spectral moments: Validating alternative measures of sibilant fricatives using listener ratings of children's speech

  JASA Express Letters · 2025-10-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Shadle [(2023). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 153, 1412-1426] proposed that the spectral peak in mid-frequency (FM) is a superior measure of place of articulation of sibilant fricatives to the most commonly used measure, the first spectral moment (M1). It is examined as to whether FM predicts adult listener's ratings of the place of articulation of 2.5-3.5-year-old children's word-initial /s/ and /ʃ/ when compared to M1. Regression models reveal that FM in 3-9 kHz range best predicts listener's ratings of children's fricatives. These results provide additional validation for FM as a measure of fricatives' place of articulation, including in children's speech.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Subtyping Speech Errors in Childhood Speech Sound Disorders with Acoustic-to-Articulatory Speech Inversion

  2025-08-17 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Validating novel measures of sibilant fricatives using phoneme goodness ratings of children’s speech

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2025-04-01

  articleSenior author

  Spectral moments (SMs, Forrest et al., 1988) are widely used to characterize fricatives. Shadle (2023) described the problems of using SMs and proposed a set of alternative parameters (APs) based on articulatory and aerodynamic models. The current study examines how well the APs from Shadle (2023) and SMs predict listener ratings of the goodness of children’s word-initial /s/ and /ʃ/ productions. Seventy-six adult listeners rated a total of 1014 /s/- and /ʃ/-initial words produced by 64 children of 2.5–3.5 years of age along a visual analog scale. For each fricative, the first four SMs were calculated for the middle portion of the fricative, as were the filter parameters in Shadle (2023): frequency and amplitude of the main peak in the 3–8 kHz range, and the frequency and amplitude of the minimum in the 0.55–3 kHz range. While correlation and mixed-effect regression analyses show that both sets of measures robustly predict adult ratings, the model with APs yielded a slightly lower AIC, indicating a better model fit. Moreover, the APs better predict the narrow transcriptions of children’s /s/ and /ʃ/ productions. Together, these findings provide external validation for Shadle’s APs.

  PublisherDOI

• Taking Up the Mantle: How Speech Scientists Can Fight Linguistic Discrimination

  Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups · 2025-06-30

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Purpose: This tutorial describes and analyzes the role of speech science in combating linguistic discrimination, that is, the unfair and unequal treatment of people based solely on the ways that they use spoken language. It describes three nonobvious cases of linguistic discrimination within speech science. Suggestions are provided for changes to the field of speech science to actively combat linguistic discrimination. This tutorial is written for a broad audience of scholars and practitioners, including undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, and members of the general public. The tutorial emphasizes the need for speech science to think more broadly about what science encompasses, and the reciprocal interactions between scientific communities and society more broadly.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Race, Ethnicity, and Speech Intelligibility in Normal Hearing and Hearing Impairment

  NIH · $423k · 2019–2023

• NIH Grant R56DC002932

  NIH · $149k · 2011

• DHB / Collaborative Research: Using Machine Learning to Model the Interplay of Production Dynamics and Perception Dynamics in Phonological Acquisition

  NSF · $130k · 2008–2011

• NIH Grant R01DC002932

  NIH · $5.2M · 2018

• NIH Grant R03DC005702

  NIH · $208k · 2007

Frequent coauthors

• Jan Edwards

  University of Maryland, College Park

  75 shared

• Mary E. Beckman

  36 shared

• Alayo Tripp

  University of Minnesota

  18 shared

• Sarah K. Schellinger

  16 shared

• Lisa M. D. Archibald

  16 shared

• Marc F. Joanisse

  Western University

  16 shared

• Molly Babel

  12 shared

• Nancy Pearl Solomon

  Stanford University

  11 shared

Labs

• SASS LabPI

Education

• PhD, Speech and Hearing Science

  The Ohio State University

• B.A., Political Science, Linguistics, Russian

  University at Buffalo

• M.A., Speech and Hearing Science

  The Ohio State University

Awards & honors

• CLA Student Board Outstanding Faculty Member of the Year (20…
• Editor's Award, Outstanding Research Article in Hearing (200…
• Award for Early Career Achievements in Research, American Sp…
• Arthur "Red" Motley Teaching Award (2006)
• McKnight Presidential Fellowship (September 2006 - August 20…