Speech is full of socially meaningful phonetic details, and listeners use these details to form judgments about talkers. For example, differences in vowel pronunciation can influence judgments about a talker’s personality, place of origin, or ethnolinguistic identity. I study the cognitive mechanisms that make these processes possible. My current work focuses on how limited executive functioning resources, like attention and working memory, affect both the perception of phonetic details in speech and the process of forming social judgments from those details.

I am also interested in how listeners combine socially meaningful visual and auditory cues during speech perception. In particular, I study how multimodal cues to gender, and how well those cues are perceived as fitting together, affect the difficulty of understanding speech.