Grace Brown

I’m a fourth-year PhD candidate in Linguistics at Stanford University, where I study how listeners use their knowledge of language to understand the social world and how that knowledge of the social world, in turn, impacts language processing. This work intersects with issues in sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and speech perception.

When we listen to someone talk, we take in what they say and, at the same time, form an impression of who they are. My research illustrates how this meaning is put together as we listen: the same linguistic feature or voice can be heard as portraying different social characteristics depending on who is listening and who they are heard alongside.

My current body of research addresses three connected questions. How do the other voices a listener hears shape how any one voice is socially categorized? I've found that listeners can the same talkers differently when they are heard alongside different voices. How do listeners decide what a stretch of speech means socially? Even within a single speakers, some instances of a variant are more likely than others to be heard as carrying a particular social meaning. This is conditioned by other elements of the acoustic signal (e.g., a vowel) that the variant is heard alongside. Listeners own positionality, such as their identity and ideology towards a particular social issue (e.g., gender roles), can also shape how they attribute social characteristics to others' voices. And how does the social makeup of talkers a listener hears in a particular event impact language processing — specifically, their ability to recognize and remember what was said? My dissertation takes up this last question, bringing exemplar accounts of spoken-word recognition together with theories of socially-guided speech processing and contextual-binding accounts of episodic memory.

I am primarily advised by Meghan Sumner and Rob Podesva, and I'm affiliated with the Stanford Phonetics Lab and the Interactional Sociophonetics Lab. My research is supported by the NSF GRFP (DGE-2146755).