Join us on May 30, 2025 for the annual Yvonne Becker Colloquium, featuring visiting speaker of UC Davis. Michelle is a Postdoctoral Fellow at . 鈥淢y research program aims to uncover the cognitive mechanisms that underlie how people produce, perceive, and learn speech patterns with voice technology. In particular, I am interested in the flexibility of the speech system, such as the impact of top-down factors. These include examinations of real (or assumed) barriers (e.g., ASR listeners), perceptions of the social attributes of another talker (e.g., their human-likeness, emotional expressiveness), and individual variation (e.g., by age, cognitive characteristics).鈥�
The Yvonne Becker Colloquium is an annual event presented by the Department of Linguistics to honour our most significant benefactor. In memory of Yvonne's great passion for linguistics, the department selects a speaker to offer a colloquium that is enlightening, cutting-edge, and unique in its perspective.
Title: Impact of AI on human language
Abstract: Millions of people now talk to voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) systems (e.g., Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, ChatGPT) to complete daily tasks. My research program tests how people (1) talk to, (2) perceive, and (3) learn language from voice-AI. At its core, I ask: is communication with voice-AI similar/distinct from communication with another human? I design experiments to probe behavior, combining methods from psycholinguistics, human-computer interaction, and phonetics. Thus far, I have found that while people produce a distinct technology-directed register, they also attribute human social qualities to the systems (e.g., gender, emotion) and learn speech patterns from them. I discuss these findings in terms of their implications for linguistic diversity and language change.