Eleanor Chodroff
Lecturer

Profile

Biography

Eleanor joined the department in April 2019 as Lecturer in Phonetics and Phonology. Her research interests are in phonetics, the phonetics-phonology interface, prosody, and speech perception. Her research integrates methods from experimental and corpus linguistics, automatic speech recognition, and cognitive psychology to better understand the representation of speech in the mind and brain.

Career

• Lecturer
• University of York (2019-)
• Postdoctoral Researcher
  Northwestern University (2017–2019)
• PhD in Cognitive Science
  Johns Hopkins University (2014–2017)
• MA in Cognitive Science
  Johns Hopkins University (2012–2014)
• BA in German and Linguistics
  New York University (2008–2012)

Teaching

Undergraduate

•  Intermediate Phonetics and Phonology

Postgraduate

• Advanced Phonology
• Quantitative Methods

Research

Overview

Variation in speech is considerable across talkers. Consider the differences between your own voice and the voice of your favorite actor. These voices may sound quite different, but listeners nevertheless experience some degree of phonetic constancy: any given word spoken by person 1 is likely to be perceived as the same word when spoken by person 2. My primary research interest in understanding not only the extent of this variation, but also its limits. In other words, how might speakers actually be similar to one another? By understanding these similarities, we can gain better insight into the structure of the phonetic and phonological systems in the minds and brains of individual speakers. Structured variation in speech, defined in my research as covariation of phonetic properties within and among speech sounds, has important implications for the phonetics-phonology interface, as well as generalized perceptual adaptation to novel speakers. I investigate these questions in a range of speaker populations including adult speakers of individual languages, cross-linguistic analyses, as well as L2 and child speakers.  

In addition to structured variation in phonetic variation, I am also interested in prosodic variation and its relation to information structure, the relative weighting of linguistic and general auditory mechanisms in speech perception, and non-native speech perception.

External activities

Invited talks and conferences

Invited talks

• 2018. University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Uniformity in phonetic realization within natural classes.
• 2018. Purdue University. Predictability of stop consonant phonetics across talkers of American English.
• 2017. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Structured variation in the production and perception of sibilant fricatives.
• 2017. University of Rochester. Uniformity in talker-specific phonetic realization: Evidence from sibilant fricatives in American English and Czech.
• 2017. University of Pennsylvania. Uniformity in talker-specific realization: Evidence from sibilant fricatives.
• 2016. Haskins Laboratories. Phonetic covariation within natural classes: Implications for linguistic structure and perceptual adaptation.

Conferences

• 2019. Chodroff, E., Arthurs, A., Kurian, P., Pazol, J., and Cole, J. Categorical and gradient effects of information structure on nuclear prominence in American English. Talk at the 93rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. New York, NY.
• 2018. Chodroff, E. and Baese-Berk, M. Parallel adjustments of phonetic targets in L2 English voice onset time. Poster at the 176th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Victoria, BC.
• 2018. Chodroff, E. and Cole, J. Information structure, affect, and prenuclear prominence in American English. Talk at Interspeech 2018. Hyderabad, India.
• 2018. Chodroff, E. Target and contrast uniformity in the phonetic realization of Czech sibilants. Poster at the 16th Conference on Laboratory Phonology. Lisbon, Portugal.
• 2017. Chodroff, E. Golden, A., and Wilson, C. Covariation of voice onset time: A universal aspect of phonetic realization. Talk at the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Salt Lake City, UT.
• 2016. Chodroff, E. and Wilson, C. Delayed effects of speech and non-speech stimuli on sibilant categorization. Poster at the 174th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. New Orleans, LA.