Department of Linguistics
University of Massachusetts Amherst
650 N. Pleasant St.
Amherst, MA 01003
irenesmith@umass.edu
Areas of expertise
Laboratory phonology
Corpus phonetics
Acoustics
Quantitative methods
Statistical modelling
Signal processing
I am a lecturer in phonetics and phonology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. My research focuses on variation in speech acoustics and perception using advanced statistical methods. The central question my thesis revolves around is how much of the fine-grained implementation of speech is learned, and how much is an automatic consequence of physics, physiology, and cognitive biases. I approach this question by looking at variation across dialects of English and across individual speakers within a dialect: the basic premise of this approach is that we can learn about what types of speech patterns are possible by looking at how speech patterns vary. I use distributional Bayesian models to assign variability within speech to different sources and to estimate uncertainty in the results.
I completed my PhD in linguistics at McGill University where I was a member of the Montréal Computational & Quantitative Linguistics Lab , supervised by Morgan Sonderegger. I held a doctoral grant from the Fonds de recherche du Québec and also received funding from the Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music. Previously, I earned a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and a Bachelor's degree in Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, and I worked for two years in acoustical signal processing at Applied Research Laboratories.