Department of Linguistics
McGill University
1085 Dr. Penfield Ave.
Montreal, Quebec H3A 1A7
irene.smith@mail.mcgill.ca
Areas of expertise
Signal processing
Acoustics
Quantitative methods
Statistical modelling
Corpus phonetics
I recently defended my doctoral thesis in phonetics at McGill University and am a member of the Montréal Computational & Quantitative Linguistics Lab , supervised by Morgan Sonderegger. I hold a doctoral grant from the Fonds de recherche du Québec and have 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.
My graduate work focused 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.