UK Phonetics wants to work with you!
The University of Kentucky Phonetics Lab is devoted to understanding how language and the minds of language users work. To do this we run a variety of experiments both in the lab and around the Commonwealth and the world. We are always looking for people who are interested in participating in one of these experiments, learning more about what we do, or contributing to our research.
Selected Research Projects
Listeners don’t need vowel centers to hear a regional accent Regionally-Accented Silent Centers
Stella Takvoryan and Kevin McGowan have been working on a project to replicate and extend Strange, Jenkins, and Johnson (1983), which found that listeners do not need vowel centers (the middle 50% of lax vowels or the middle 65% of tense vowels) to accurately identify words like bit, bait, and bet. Our lab added a second manipulation to the original paradigm, asking listeners if they could tell where the talker was from on some trials and what they were saying on others. The first results from this study are in and were presented at Midphon 30 in Bloomington, Indiana. See the poster’s webpage and download a pdf here.
Removing the disguise: The Matched Guise Technique, Incongruity, & Listener Awareness
Lab alumnus, Kyler Laycock and Kevin McGowan recently published a paper in the Journal of Sociolinguistics investigating the intersection of listener awareness and instructions provided in the Matched Guise Technique. It turns out that, at least in this study, listeners incorporate social information into their perceptions of speech even if they have no reason to believe that social information is accurate. This article, entitled Removing the disguise: The Matched Guise Technique, Incongruity, & Listener Awareness is part of the 2025 theme series on awareness in sociolinguistics.
Awareness and Control in Sociolinguistics Research A theme series in the Journal of Sociolinguistics
Friends of the lab, Anna M. Babel and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler of The Ohio State University and Kevin McGowan of our lab have organized a theme issue for the Journal of Sociolinguistics on the topic of Awareness and Control in Sociolinguistics Research and have published an Introduction to the theme issue along with Anna’s contribution A Semiotic approach to Social Meaning in Language and Kathryn’s contribution Place-Based Accentedness Ratings Do Not Predict Sensitivity to Regional Features in the February 2025 issue of the Journal.
Wildcat Voices the University of Kentucky speech archive project
The goal of the Wildcat Voices project is nothing less than 100% coverage of the entire UK student population. We want every student, from every language background, to make their voice a part of our speech corpus. Please participate today and share the link with your friends. tweet. tumbl. snapchat. We can do this with your help.
Participate
Voice discrimination in the housing market
Kelly Wright & McGowan are collaborating on a replication and extension of Purnell, Idsardi and Baugh (1999); a matched-guise study on voice-based discrimination in leasing. The replication addresses possible methodological concerns while expanding the cities, regions, and speakers studied. Crucially, this replication includes a detailed survey of rental professionals themselves – in the hope of better understanding who is answering the phone and how that matters. This work combines Wright’s previous experience with lexically reified bias with McGowan’s previous research on expectation mismatches in matched guise studies.
Native Language and Trumpet Performance
Marisa Youngs, a doctoral of musical arts student in the College of Fine Arts, is working with our lab to investige the physical process of teaching vowel formation and consonant articulation in trumpet pedagogy. She is interested in the effect that native language and dialect have on trumpet technique and how this affects the learning process.
