About

Meredith Tamminga is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Language Variation and Cognition Lab. She is a lead researcher on the Philadelphia Signs Project and serves as an Associate Editor at Glossa Psycholinguistics. Additionally, she is affiliated with several initiatives at MindCORE, Penn's hub for the integrative study of the mind, including the Social and Behavioral Sciences Initiative, the Social and Cultural Evolution Working Group, and Integrated Language Sciences and Technology. Her research interests encompass sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and language change. Meredith Tamminga earned her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 and holds a BA in Linguistics from McGill University, obtained in 2009.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Cognitive psychology
• Mathematics
• Library science
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Experimental priming of phonological variant identification

  CityU Scholars · 2026-03-05

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Data and analysis scripts

  PublisherOA PDF

• Validating explicit rating tasks for measuring pronunciation biases: A case study of ING variation

  Behavior Research Methods · 2026-02-17 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Spoken language is highly variable, as words can have different pronunciation variants. A growing body of psycholinguistic research has employed experimental methods such as explicit rating tasks to obtain user biases toward different pronunciation variants. However, no prior work has empirically validated whether experimentally elicited user estimates accurately reflect real-world usage patterns. By correlating user estimates and conversational speech data for English variable ING pronunciations under different experimental prompts, we found that while rating tasks can provide word biases that do correlate significantly with corpus word biases, the correlations are only modest and there are asymmetries in the relationship between elicited word biases and corpus word biases. These findings call for future research to incorporate word biases into the study of sociolinguistic variation and language processing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Experimental priming of phonological variant identification

  Laboratory Phonology Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology · 2026-02-02

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In conversational speech, it has been observed that speakers tend to reuse the variant that they have recently used. This recency effect, also called 'persistence' or 'repetitiveness', has often been attributed to 'priming' in the psycholinguistic terms. However, it is still not clear whether one can really be primed to choose one variant over another with discrete phonological variation in an experimental set-up. This study empirically tests the hypothesis that having most recently perceived one variant increases the probability of reusing the same variant in speech perception on a subsequent trial, controlling for overall variant rates. Using the well-studied variable ING, i.e., the alternation between -ing and -in' as a test case, our results reveal that phonological variant identification can be primed, and that this variant priming decays rapidly, only after one intervening word. The difference between variant persistence and variant priming regarding their decay profiles ultimately calls into question whether repetitiveness in conversational speech is really driven by priming.

  PublisherDOI

• English Particle Verbs Prime Double Object Constructions in Production

  Linguistic Inquiry · 2026-02-02

  article

  Abstract We report on a production priming experiment (N=238) in which particle verb constructions (Ana lifted up Hsu) prime double object constructions (Ana gave Hsu the book). This result is expected under syntactic models that take the two constructions to share abstract structure, including Small Clause approaches in the tradition of Kayne 1984, 1985. The result is not expressed by models positing no shared structure between the constructions, including common versions of complex predicate approaches to particle verb constructions and applicative approaches to double object constructions.

  PublisherDOI

• Extragrammatical factors and the locus of sociophonetic variation

  2026-01-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter considers the influence of grammar-external conditioning factors on sociophonetic variation. Although sociostylistic factors are also understood to be extragrammatical, the focus here is on factors that reflect the physical and psychological systems used for the online production of variation. The chapter suggests that by investigating the empirical properties of extragrammatical conditioning on sociophonetic variation, we can learn more about the locus of variation for phenomena at the phonetics–phonology interface. Psycholinguistic priming is considered as an example of an extragrammatical factor that demonstrates both the challenges and potential benefits of understanding extragrammatical factors. Finally, the chapter raises questions about how extragrammatical factors like priming might interact with sociostylistic factors as ultimately their influences may be inextricable.

  PublisherDOI

• Bill Labov: Looking Back, Looking Forward

  Journal of Sociolinguistics · 2025-08-04 · 2 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Bill Labov passed away peacefully at home on December 17, 2024, with his wife and fellow Penn linguist Gillian Sankoff by his side. He leaves behind a legacy so large that it is hard to put into words. All three authors were fortunate enough to have had Bill as our PhD supervisor (Laurel: 2012, Meredith: 2014, Betsy: 2018). We feel that the many hours we spent in his presence and with his work have given us a good insight into who and how he was. We also feel deep love and gratitude for him and for his imprint on the field and on us. As such, this piece is our reflection on Bill as a person, an advisor, and a scholar, from our perspective as three of his students from his later years.

  PublisherDOI

• Expectation-driven shifts in perception and production

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2025-10-01

  articleSenior author

  While phonetic convergence has been taken as evidence for tight perception-production links, attempts to correlate perceptual adjustments with production shifts have been inconsistent, and the existence of expectation-driven convergence further complicates our understanding of this relationship. Here, we report the results of a go/no-go lexical decision task showing that expectation-driven perceptual shifts occur toward the same stimuli that has previously been shown to elicit expectation-driven convergence. We also replicate previous expectation-driven convergence results in production using the Word Naming Game [from Wade (2022). Language 98(1), 63-97]. However, we fail to find evidence that individuals' expectation-driven shifts in perception correlate with those in production. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for the role of expectations on linguistic behavior and the relationship between perception and production.

  PublisherDOI

• Searching for homophony avoidance in English coronal stop deletion

  Phonology · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract It is well-known that English variable word-final coronal stop deletion (CSD) is less likely to occur when the final coronal stop instantiates the inflectional suffix -ed . It is sometimes hypothesised that the reason for this effect is to avoid the homophony between past and present tenses that would result from the suffix -ed being deleted. This reasoning suggests another hypothesis: that CSD should also be disfavoured when it would create homophony between two distinct lexical items, such as bald and ball . In this squib, we test that hypothesis on data from a corpus of Philadelphia English. We find no evidence that probability of CSD is affected by homophony avoidance between lexical items. This weakens the case that homophony avoidance is at play in disfavouring CSD in the -ed case, and may have implications for the theory of homophony avoidance in phonology in general.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Social Evaluation of T-flapping in Singapore English: The Role of Internal Constraints

  ScholarlyCommons (University of Pennsylvania) · 2025-11-14

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Although both external (social) and internal (linguistic) factors influence variable production, it is unclear to what extent social evaluation is sensitive to internal factors. This study asks whether T-flapping in Singapore English is evaluated differently depending on the word class hosting the variable token, comparing numbers, which show high rates of T-flapping in production, to non-numbers, which show minimal T-flapping. We conducted a series of matched-guise experiments crossing word class (number, non-number) with variant (flap, stop), eliciting native speaker ratings (n=66) designed to capture judgments of localness (naturalness, fakeness, and closeness to listener's own speech). We find a word class-by-variant interaction such that flaps are rated as sounding less local in non-numbers than numbers, whereas stops were rated equally local regardless of word class. These results add to evidence that listeners use knowledge about probabilistic constraints on variable production to inform social perception, and that social evaluation can be sensitive to internal factors. We propose that some axes of social evaluation, such as the ones used here, probe intuitions pertaining to stylistic well-formedness and knowledge of community norms of variable production, and hence are likelier to show such sensitivity.

  Publisher

• Diachrony and Diachronica

  Diachronica · 2024-06-11 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Cognitive characteristics of the leaders of language change

  NSF · $126k · 2016–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Julie Hochgesang

  63 shared

• Jami N. Fisher

  62 shared

• David Embick

  7 shared

• Laurel MacKenzie

  New York University

  6 shared

• Wei Lai

  H.B. Fuller (United States)

  5 shared

• Lacey Wade

  University of Kansas

  5 shared

• Yosiane White

  3 shared

• Aini Li

  California University of Pennsylvania

  3 shared

Labs

• Department of LinguisticsPI

Education

• Ph.D., Language variation and change, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics

  University of Pennsylvania

  2014