Georgia Zellou
Biographic Data
| ID | 221441 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Georgia Zellou |
| GIVEN NAMES | Georgia |
| FAMILY NAME | Zellou |
| SIGNATURE | ZELLOU G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Davis |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9167-0744 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 56 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Phonetic and phonological enhancement strategies in Tarifit robot-directed speech
This study examines phonological and phonetic adaptations in Robot-directed speech (Robot-DS) in Tarifit, an Amazigh language of Morocco. Thirty native speakers (younger and older adults) produced CCəC verbs in two contexts: baseline reading and interaction with a robot. Analyses focused on three features: (1) vowelless word realizations (schwa deletion), (2) schwa epenthesis in onset clusters, and (3) schwa duration. Results reveal categorical a…
“Es una pelota, do you like the ball?”: Pitch in Spanish-English bilingual infant directed speech
The goal of this research is to understand how bilingual and monolingual parents adjust their speech when talking to infants. We examined pitch characteristics of infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) with Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual parents and their infants (8–20 months of age). Thirty-eight parent-infant dyads participated in two naturalistic play tasks. Parents spoke with a bilingual researcher to …
Prosodic variation between contexts in infant-directed speech
Speakers consider their listeners and adjust the way they communicate. One well-studied example is the register of infant-directed speech (IDS), which differs acoustically from speech directed to adults. However, little work has explored how parents adjust speech to infants across different contexts. This is important because infants and parents engage in many activities throughout each day. The current study tests whether the properties of IDS i…
Exploring variation in sociolinguistic evaluation across human and machine talkers
Socially meaningful language variation is present in every spoken utterance. However, little research has investigated whether listeners perceive sociolinguistic variation in computer voices similarly to how they do for human voices. “Social” computers are becoming widespread in today’s social landscape, and they are designed to use many characteristics of human social communication in their speech, such as politeness and gendered language. Do li…
Variation in Rhoticity in Tarifit: Evidence from production, perception, and imitation
The current study examines variation in postvocalic /r/ in Tarifit, an indigenous Amazigh language of northern Morocco. R-elision is the most frequent phonological form (over 80% of productions in our data). Non-rhoticity is socially conditioned by gender: women produce more r-elision than men. No age differences were observed. Thus, production data indicate that derhoticization is a highly advanced sound change in Tarifit. Additionally, speakers…
Cross-language variation in the acceptability of vowelless nonwords
This study examines the acceptability of voweled and vowelless nonwords produced by a native speaker of Tashlhiyt (a Moroccan Amazigh language) across listeners from five different language groups: L1 Tashlhiyt, L1 Tarifit, L1 Moroccan Arabic, L1 English, and L1 Mandarin. The languages vary in the complexity of allowable word types, though only Tashlhiyt allows lexically vowelless word forms. Hyper- and hypo-speech forms of the items were also co…
Apparent Talker Variability and Speaking Style Similarity Can Enhance Comprehension of Novel L2-Accented Talkers
Certain studies report facilitatory effects of multiple-talker exposure on cross-talker generalization of L2-accented speech (often defined as greater comprehension of novel talkers). However, a confound exists in prior work: do multiple-talker exposure benefits stem from the greater number of talkers (numerosity) or greater phonological variability (heterogeneity)? This study examined how apparent talker variability and speaking style affect L2-…
How to Win Friends and Influence People: A How-To Guide for Linguists
Perception of Mandarin tones across different phonological contexts by native and tone-naive listeners
Coarticulation is a type of speech variation where sounds take on phonetic properties of adjacent sounds. Listeners generally display perceptual compensation, attributing coarticulatory variation to its source. Mandarin Chinese lexical tones are coarticulated based on surrounding tones. We tested how L1-Mandarin and naive listeners compensate for tonal coarticulation using a paired discrimination task. L1 listeners showed greater perceptual sensi…
Apparent-time variation in the use of multiple cues for perception of anticipatory nasal coarticulation in California English
This study examines apparent-time variation in the use of multiple acoustic cues present on coarticulatorily nasalized vowels in California English. Eighty-nine listeners ranging in age from 18-58 (grouped into 3 apparent-time categories based on year of birth) performed lexical identifications on syllables excised from words with oral and nasal codas from six speakers who produced either minimal (n=3) or extensive (n=3) anticipatory nasal coarti…
The perception of vowelless words in Tashlhiyt
This study examines the perceptual mechanisms involved in the processing of words without vowels, a lexical form that is common in Tashlhiyt but highly dispreferred cross-linguistically. In Experiment 1, native Tashlhiyt and non-native (English-speaking) listeners completed a paired discrimination task where the middle segment of the different-pair was either a vowel (e.g., fan vs. fin), consonant (e.g., ʁbr vs. ʁdr), or vowelless vs. voweled con…
Linguistic patterning of laughter in human-socialbot interactions
Laughter is a social behavior that conveys a variety of emotional states and is also intricately intertwined with linguistic communication. As people increasingly engage with voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) systems, an open question is how laughter patterns during spoken language interactions with technology. In Experiment 1, we collected a corpus of recorded short conversations (~10 min in length) between users ( n = 76) and …
Learning a language with vowelless words
Vowelless words are exceptionally typologically rare, though they are found in some languages, such as Tashlhiyt (e.g., fkt 'give it'). The current study tests whether lexicons containing tri-segmental (CCC) vowelless words are more difficult to acquire than lexicons not containing vowelless words by adult English speakers from brief auditory exposure. The role of acoustic-phonetic form on learning these typologically rare word forms is also expl…
Introduction to the special collection on public outreach in linguistics
This is the introduction to the special collection on public outreach in linguistics
Being clear about clear speech: Intelligibility of hard-of-hearing-directed, non-native-directed, and casual speech for L1- and L2-English listeners
Relative to one’s default (casual) speech, clear speech contains acoustic modifications that are often perceptually beneficial. Clear speech encompasses many different styles, yet most work only compares clear and casual speech as a binary. Furthermore, the term “clear speech” is often unclear − despite variation in elicitation instructions across studies (e.g., speak clearly, imagine an L2-listener or someone with hearing loss, etc.), the generi…
Lexical competition influences coarticulatory variation in French: Comparing competition from nasal and oral vowel minimal pairs
It is hypothesized that the phonological status of a phonetic feature across languages predicts patterns of coarticulatory variation. In French, vowel nasality encodes lexical contrast, e.g. cède /sɛd/ vs. saint /sɛ̃/. Vowel nasality also occurs as coarticulation from nasal consonants (e.g. scènes /sɛn/), though it is minimal in degree arguably due to pressure to maintain the contrast between phonologically oral and nasal vowels. Yet, the extent …
Perceptual identification of oral and nasalized vowels across American English and British English listeners and TTS voices
Nasal coarticulation is when the lowering of the velum for a nasal consonant co-occurs with the production of an adjacent vowel, causing the vowel to become (at least partially) nasalized. In the case of anticipatory nasal coarticulation, enhanced coarticulatory magnitude on the vowel facilitates the identification of an upcoming nasal coda consonant. However, nasalization also affects the acoustic properties of the vowel, including formant frequ…
Vocal accommodation to technology: The role of physical form
This study examines participants’ vocal accommodation toward text-to-speech (TTS) voices produced by three devices, varying in the extent to which they embody a human form. Thirty eight speakers shadowed words produced by a male and female TTS voice presented across three physical forms: an Amazon Echo smart speaker (least human-like), Nao robot (slightly more human-like), and a Furhat robot (more human-like). Ninety-six independent raters comple…
Listener beliefs and perceptual learning: Differences between device and human guises
Listeners have a remarkable ability to adapt to novel speech patterns, such as a new accent or an idiosyncratic pronunciation. In almost all of the previous studies examining this phenomenon, the participating listeners had reason to believe that the speech signal was produced by a human being. However, people are increasingly interacting with voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) devices that produce speech using text-to-speech (TT…
Face-Masked Speech Intelligibility: The Influence of Speaking Style, Visual Information, and Background Noise
The current study investigates the intelligibility of face-masked speech while manipulating speaking style, presence of visual information about the speaker, and level of background noise. Speakers produced sentences while in both face-masked and non-face-masked conditions in clear and casual speaking styles. Two online experiments presented the sentences to listeners in multi-talker babble at different signal-to-noise ratios: −6 dB SNR and −3 dB…
Introduction to sound change in endangered or small speech communities
How sound change is initiated and propagates in smaller speech communities is not well understood. This paper provides an overview of the main themes, including theoretical and methodological issues, of the special collection on sound change in endangered and small speech communities
German Word-Final Devoicing in Naturally-Produced and TTS Speech
This study explores the production and perception of word-final devoicing in German across text-to-speech (from technology used in common voice-AI "smart" speaker devices-specifically, voices from Apple and Amazon) and naturally produced utterances. First, the phonetic realization of word-final devoicing in German across text-to-speech (TTS) and naturally produced word productions was compared. Acoustic analyses reveal that the presence of cues t…
Acoustic-phonetic properties of Siri- and human-directed speech
Millions of people engage in spoken interactions with voice activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) systems in their everyday lives. This study explores whether speakers have a voice-AI-specific register, relative to their speech toward an adult human. Furthermore, this study tests if speakers have targeted error correction strategies for voice-AI and human interlocutors. In a pseudo-interactive task with pre-recorded Siri and human voices,…
Age- and Gender-Related Differences in Speech Alignment Toward Humans and Voice-AI
Speech alignment is where talkers subconsciously adopt the speech and language patterns of their interlocutor. Nowadays, people of all ages are speaking with voice-activated, artificially-intelligent (voice-AI) digital assistants through phones or smart speakers. This study examines participants’ age (older adults, 53–81 years old vs. younger adults, 18–39 years old) and gender (female and male) on degree of speech alignment during shadowing of (…
Prosodic Differences in Human- and Alexa-Directed Speech, but Similar Local Intelligibility Adjustments
The current study tests whether individuals ( n = 53) produce distinct speech adaptations during pre-scripted spoken interactions with a voice-AI assistant (Amazon’s Alexa) relative to those with a human interlocutor. Interactions crossed intelligibility pressures (staged word misrecognitions) and emotionality (hyper-expressive interjections) as conversation-internal factors that might influence participants’ intelligibility adjustments in Alexa-…
Individual Differences in Language Processing: Phonology
Individual variation is ubiquitous and empirically observable in most phonological behaviors, yet relatively few studies aim to capture the heterogeneity of language processing among individuals, as opposed to those focusing primarily on group-level patterns. The study of individual differences can shed light on the nature of the cognitive representations and mechanisms involved in phonological processing. To guide our review of individual variat…
Individual differences in the production of nasal coarticulation and perceptual compensation
Nasal coarticulation changes over time in Philadelphia English
Phonetic and phonological patterns of nasality in Lakota vowels
Lakota (Siouan) has both contrastive and coarticulatory vowel nasality, and both nasal and oral vowels can occur before or after a nasal consonant. This study examines the timing and degree patterns of acoustic vowel nasality across contrastive and coarticulatory contexts in Lakota, based on data from six Lakota native speakers. There is clear evidence of both anticipatory and carryover nasal coarticulation across oral and nasal vowels, with a gr…
Acoustic-phonetic properties of Siri- and human-directed speech
Millions of people engage in spoken interactions with voice activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) systems in their everyday lives. This study explores whether speakers have a voice-AI-specific register, relative to their speech toward an adult human. Furthermore, this study tests if speakers have targeted error correction strategies for voice-AI and human interlocutors. In a pseudo-interactive task with pre-recorded Siri and human voices,…
Being clear about clear speech: Intelligibility of hard-of-hearing-directed, non-native-directed, and casual speech for L1- and L2-English listeners
Relative to one’s default (casual) speech, clear speech contains acoustic modifications that are often perceptually beneficial. Clear speech encompasses many different styles, yet most work only compares clear and casual speech as a binary. Furthermore, the term “clear speech” is often unclear − despite variation in elicitation instructions across studies (e.g., speak clearly, imagine an L2-listener or someone with hearing loss, etc.), the generi…
Listener beliefs and perceptual learning: Differences between device and human guises
Listeners have a remarkable ability to adapt to novel speech patterns, such as a new accent or an idiosyncratic pronunciation. In almost all of the previous studies examining this phenomenon, the participating listeners had reason to believe that the speech signal was produced by a human being. However, people are increasingly interacting with voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) devices that produce speech using text-to-speech (TT…
Listeners maintain phonological uncertainty over time and across words: The case of vowel nasality in English
Moroccan Arabic borrowed circumfix from Berber: Investigating morphological categories in a language contact situation
Moroccan Arabic (MA) has a derivational noun circumfix /ta-...-t/ that is borrowed from the neighboring Berber languages. This circumfix is highly productive on native MA noun stems but not productive on borrowed Berber stems (which are rare in MA). This pattern of productivity is taken to be evidence in support of direct borrowing of morphology (c.f. Steinkruger and Seifart 2009) and against a theory where borrowed morphology enters a language a…
Nasal coarticulation changes over time in Philadelphia English
Phonetic and phonological patterns of nasality in Lakota vowels
Lakota (Siouan) has both contrastive and coarticulatory vowel nasality, and both nasal and oral vowels can occur before or after a nasal consonant. This study examines the timing and degree patterns of acoustic vowel nasality across contrastive and coarticulatory contexts in Lakota, based on data from six Lakota native speakers. There is clear evidence of both anticipatory and carryover nasal coarticulation across oral and nasal vowels, with a gr…
Individual differences in the production of nasal coarticulation and perceptual compensation
Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Performance Styles of 100 American Poets
Literary readings provoke strong feelings, which feed intense critical de-bates. And while recorded literary readings have long been available for study, few scholars have applied to them the empirical methods that the digitalhumanities and interdisciplinary sound studies now offer
Individual Differences in Language Processing: Phonology
Individual variation is ubiquitous and empirically observable in most phonological behaviors, yet relatively few studies aim to capture the heterogeneity of language processing among individuals, as opposed to those focusing primarily on group-level patterns. The study of individual differences can shed light on the nature of the cognitive representations and mechanisms involved in phonological processing. To guide our review of individual variat…
Listeners maintain phonological uncertainty over time and across words: The case of vowel nasality in English
Age- and Gender-Related Differences in Speech Alignment Toward Humans and Voice-AI
Speech alignment is where talkers subconsciously adopt the speech and language patterns of their interlocutor. Nowadays, people of all ages are speaking with voice-activated, artificially-intelligent (voice-AI) digital assistants through phones or smart speakers. This study examines participants’ age (older adults, 53–81 years old vs. younger adults, 18–39 years old) and gender (female and male) on degree of speech alignment during shadowing of (…
Prosodic Differences in Human- and Alexa-Directed Speech, but Similar Local Intelligibility Adjustments
The current study tests whether individuals ( n = 53) produce distinct speech adaptations during pre-scripted spoken interactions with a voice-AI assistant (Amazon’s Alexa) relative to those with a human interlocutor. Interactions crossed intelligibility pressures (staged word misrecognitions) and emotionality (hyper-expressive interjections) as conversation-internal factors that might influence participants’ intelligibility adjustments in Alexa-…
Speech Rate Adjustments in Conversations With an Amazon Alexa Socialbot
This paper investigates users’ speech rate adjustments during conversations with an Amazon Alexa socialbot in response to situational (in-lab vs. at-home) and communicative (ASR comprehension errors) factors. We collected user interaction studies and measured speech rate at each turn in the conversation and in baseline productions (collected prior to the interaction). Overall, we find that users slow their speech rate when talking to the bot, rel…
Intelligibility of face-masked speech depends on speaking style: Comparing casual, clear, and emotional speech
Face-Masked Speech Intelligibility: The Influence of Speaking Style, Visual Information, and Background Noise
The current study investigates the intelligibility of face-masked speech while manipulating speaking style, presence of visual information about the speaker, and level of background noise. Speakers produced sentences while in both face-masked and non-face-masked conditions in clear and casual speaking styles. Two online experiments presented the sentences to listeners in multi-talker babble at different signal-to-noise ratios: −6 dB SNR and −3 dB…
Introduction to sound change in endangered or small speech communities
How sound change is initiated and propagates in smaller speech communities is not well understood. This paper provides an overview of the main themes, including theoretical and methodological issues, of the special collection on sound change in endangered and small speech communities
German Word-Final Devoicing in Naturally-Produced and TTS Speech
This study explores the production and perception of word-final devoicing in German across text-to-speech (from technology used in common voice-AI "smart" speaker devices-specifically, voices from Apple and Amazon) and naturally produced utterances. First, the phonetic realization of word-final devoicing in German across text-to-speech (TTS) and naturally produced word productions was compared. Acoustic analyses reveal that the presence of cues t…
Acoustic-phonetic properties of Siri- and human-directed speech
Millions of people engage in spoken interactions with voice activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) systems in their everyday lives. This study explores whether speakers have a voice-AI-specific register, relative to their speech toward an adult human. Furthermore, this study tests if speakers have targeted error correction strategies for voice-AI and human interlocutors. In a pseudo-interactive task with pre-recorded Siri and human voices,…
Lexical competition influences coarticulatory variation in French: Comparing competition from nasal and oral vowel minimal pairs
It is hypothesized that the phonological status of a phonetic feature across languages predicts patterns of coarticulatory variation. In French, vowel nasality encodes lexical contrast, e.g. cède /sɛd/ vs. saint /sɛ̃/. Vowel nasality also occurs as coarticulation from nasal consonants (e.g. scènes /sɛn/), though it is minimal in degree arguably due to pressure to maintain the contrast between phonologically oral and nasal vowels. Yet, the extent …
Perceptual identification of oral and nasalized vowels across American English and British English listeners and TTS voices
Nasal coarticulation is when the lowering of the velum for a nasal consonant co-occurs with the production of an adjacent vowel, causing the vowel to become (at least partially) nasalized. In the case of anticipatory nasal coarticulation, enhanced coarticulatory magnitude on the vowel facilitates the identification of an upcoming nasal coda consonant. However, nasalization also affects the acoustic properties of the vowel, including formant frequ…
Vocal accommodation to technology: The role of physical form
This study examines participants’ vocal accommodation toward text-to-speech (TTS) voices produced by three devices, varying in the extent to which they embody a human form. Thirty eight speakers shadowed words produced by a male and female TTS voice presented across three physical forms: an Amazon Echo smart speaker (least human-like), Nao robot (slightly more human-like), and a Furhat robot (more human-like). Ninety-six independent raters comple…
Listener beliefs and perceptual learning: Differences between device and human guises
Listeners have a remarkable ability to adapt to novel speech patterns, such as a new accent or an idiosyncratic pronunciation. In almost all of the previous studies examining this phenomenon, the participating listeners had reason to believe that the speech signal was produced by a human being. However, people are increasingly interacting with voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) devices that produce speech using text-to-speech (TT…
Perception of Mandarin tones across different phonological contexts by native and tone-naive listeners
Coarticulation is a type of speech variation where sounds take on phonetic properties of adjacent sounds. Listeners generally display perceptual compensation, attributing coarticulatory variation to its source. Mandarin Chinese lexical tones are coarticulated based on surrounding tones. We tested how L1-Mandarin and naive listeners compensate for tonal coarticulation using a paired discrimination task. L1 listeners showed greater perceptual sensi…
Apparent-time variation in the use of multiple cues for perception of anticipatory nasal coarticulation in California English
This study examines apparent-time variation in the use of multiple acoustic cues present on coarticulatorily nasalized vowels in California English. Eighty-nine listeners ranging in age from 18-58 (grouped into 3 apparent-time categories based on year of birth) performed lexical identifications on syllables excised from words with oral and nasal codas from six speakers who produced either minimal (n=3) or extensive (n=3) anticipatory nasal coarti…
The perception of vowelless words in Tashlhiyt
This study examines the perceptual mechanisms involved in the processing of words without vowels, a lexical form that is common in Tashlhiyt but highly dispreferred cross-linguistically. In Experiment 1, native Tashlhiyt and non-native (English-speaking) listeners completed a paired discrimination task where the middle segment of the different-pair was either a vowel (e.g., fan vs. fin), consonant (e.g., ʁbr vs. ʁdr), or vowelless vs. voweled con…
Linguistic patterning of laughter in human-socialbot interactions
Laughter is a social behavior that conveys a variety of emotional states and is also intricately intertwined with linguistic communication. As people increasingly engage with voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) systems, an open question is how laughter patterns during spoken language interactions with technology. In Experiment 1, we collected a corpus of recorded short conversations (~10 min in length) between users ( n = 76) and …
Learning a language with vowelless words
Vowelless words are exceptionally typologically rare, though they are found in some languages, such as Tashlhiyt (e.g., fkt 'give it'). The current study tests whether lexicons containing tri-segmental (CCC) vowelless words are more difficult to acquire than lexicons not containing vowelless words by adult English speakers from brief auditory exposure. The role of acoustic-phonetic form on learning these typologically rare word forms is also expl…
Introduction to the special collection on public outreach in linguistics
This is the introduction to the special collection on public outreach in linguistics
Phonetics and Phonology Research (26 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Linguistics (19 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (18 works) · Speech recognition (16 works) · Perception (11 works) · Speech and dialogue systems (9 works) · Vowel (9 works) · Audiology (7 works)