Faculty Fellows' Lunch Featuring Meghan Sumner

Date
Thu March 19th 2015, 12:00pm
Faculty Fellows' Lunch Featuring Meghan Sumner

Meghan Sumner: "Social Biases in Spoken Language Understanding"

In this talk, Professor Sumner provides a discussion of variation that occurs in spoken words.  And, she illustrates how this variation provides information about words and sounds, but also about talker traits (age, gender, accent, etc.).  Then, she discusses some recent work showing that this information, for better or worse, influences how we attend to and weight the words of individual talkers - at the earliest stages of spoken language understanding.

Meghan Sumner is Associate Professor of Linguistics.