Thu, 08/06/2009 - 2:37pm — mbabel

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Educational Background

2004, B.A., University of Minnesota
2006, M.A., University of California, Berkeley
2009, PhD., University of California, Berkeley

Areas of Interest

Broadly, I am interested in speech perception and production, and there is a strong theme of cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal inquiry in my work. More specifically, my research program focuses on the role of experience and exposure to phonetic and phonological knowledge, how social knowledge may be manifested phonetically, and the mental representation of phonetic and phonological knowledge. A significant portion of my work explores how interacting language systems influence one another on a phonetic level. I have investigated this within bilingual speakers (English and Northern Paiute), across dialects (Australian and New Zealand Englishes), and within dialects (American English). I also have a strong interest in language documentation and description; with colleagues at University of California, Berkeley, I conducted fieldwork on Northern Paiute (Numic; Uto-Aztecan).

Please see my main website for more about my research interests, links to papers, and course information.

Courses Recently Taught

Graduate. Ling 530
Undergraduate. Ling 316, 317, 445

Recent Publications

Babel, Molly, Houser, Michael, & Toosarvandani, Maziar. (in press). Phonetic Description of Mono Lake Northern Paiute. Journal of the International Phonetic Alphabet, pp. 1-12.

Babel, Molly & Benjamin Munson. (to appear). Producing Socially Meaningful Linguistic Variation. In The Oxford Handbook of Language Production, Victor Ferreira, Matt Goldrick, & Michele Miozzo (Eds.). pp. 1-48.

Babel, Molly, Garrett, Andrew, Houser, Michael, & Toosarvandani, Maziar. (in press). Descent and diffusion in language diversification: A study of Western Numic dialectology. International Journal of American Linguistics.

Babel, M. (2012). Evidence for phonetic and social selectivity in spontaneous phonetic imitation. Journal of Phonetics, 40, pp. 177-189.

Babel, Molly. (2011). Imitation in Speech. Acoustics Today, 7, 4, 16-23.

Babel, M., & Bulatov, D. (2011). The role of fundamental frequency in phonetic accommodation. Language and Speech, 1-18.

Babel, Molly. (2010). Dialect convergence and divergence in New Zealand English. Language in Society, 39 (4), 437-456.

Babel, Molly & Johnson, Keith. (2010). Accessing psycho-acoustic perception with speech sounds. Laboratory Phonology, 1(1), 179-205.

Johnson, Keith & Babel, Molly. (2010). On the perceptual basis of distinctive features: Evidence from the perception of fricatives by Dutch and English speakers. Journal of Phonetics, 38 (1), 127-136.

Babel, Molly. (2009). The phonetics and phonology of obsolescence in Northern Paiute. In Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages, Preston & Stanford (eds.), Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Babel, Molly. (2008). The phonetic and phonological effects of moribundity. Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, v. 14.2, Gorman & Nguyen (eds.).

Munson, Benjamin & Molly Babel. (2007). Loose lips and silver tongues, or projecting sexual orientation through speech. Language and Linguistic Compass.

Babel, Molly & Keith Johnson. (2007). Cross-linguistic differences in the perception of palatalization. Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences.

Babel, Molly. (2007). Social judgments and their acoustic cues in read speech. UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report, available here, pp. 226-264.

Munson, Benjamin & Molly Babel. (2005). The sequential cueing effect in children's speech production. Applied Psycholinguistics, 26 (2), 157-174.