Abby Walker

Grad Student, Department of
Linguistics, The Ohio State University

• About

  • I'm a sociophonetician (or phonesociolinguist?) using primarily experimental methods to investigate what speech production, speech perception, and people perception (based on speech), can tell us about how language is organized and utilized in the mind.

• Research Interests

  • A lot of my work has centered around intraspeaker variation - the causes and constraints of phonetic shifts within speakers:

    • Social and linguistic constraints on phonetic convergence (with Kathryn Campbell-Kibler; with Kathryn Campbell-KIbler and Kodi Weatherholtz): In the first project, KCK and I looked at cross dialectal effects on word shadowing, with a special interest in how dialect and vowel class interacted. In the second project, we're looking at how multiple levels of linguistic structure, as well as body language, align during interviews.
    • Talking (American) football; talking (EPL) football (with Jessica Love). Jess and I collected interviews with fans of EPL soccer, and talked to them about soccer and gridiron (American football). We found that speakers shifted their level of rhoticity between the two subjects, but only if they were fans of both sports.
    • Drager, Katie, Jennifer Hay, & Abby Walker (2010) Pronounced rivalries: Attitudes and speech production. Te Reo 53: 27-53: We had participants read either good or bad (or no) facts about Australia, then read a wordlist, and found that production shifted depending on the condition, but did so differently for fans of sport (presumably due to cross Tasman rivalries).
    • Realisations of polysemous words (with Katie Drager). Data collection happening now!
    • The production and perception of Lombard speech produced in different noise conditions (First Qualifying Paper): I found that matching noise conditions for the production and perception of Lombard speech didn't facilitate intelligibility. I additionally found that the intelligibility advantage of Lombard speech over speech produced in quiet (when both are leveled) didn't hold when correct answers relied on correctly identifying a consonant.

    I've also been doing work on the perceptual side, looking at both language processing and social evaluations of speakers.

    • Abby Walker & Jennifer Hay (2011). Congruence between ‘word age’ and ‘voice age’ facilitates lexical access. Labphon 1(2):219-237: Jen and I used a lexical decision task to show that words used more by older people were accessed faster when said by an older speaker, vs. a younger speaker. We're currently doing a follow up with gendered words.
    • The effect of linguistic constraints in social judgements given to speakers using different realisations of phrase-final /t/ in New Zealand English (Second Qualifying Paper). Specifically I've been looking at effects of word frequency.
    • The effect of sociophonetic information on grammaticality judgements (MA Thesis, University of Canterbury).

    I'm also currently involved in a very cool project on frequency effects in a push chain (with Jen Hay and Janet Pierrehumbert).

• Teaching

  • This Winter 2012 I am teaching Ling 286: Analyzing the Sounds of Language.

    I've previously taught Ling 367.01: Language, Sex and Gender in America, and Ling 201: Introduction to Linguistics in the Humanities.

• Personal

  • I'm a New Zealander, a Common Room girl, Cyril and Pat's daughter, Morgan's big sister, and godmother to Phineas. My clever husband designed this site for me.

• Contact

  • 200 Oxley, 1712 Neil Ave, Columbus 43201
    ajwalker@ling.osu.edu

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