Meghan Sumner

I am an Associate Professor of Phonetics at Stanford. My work simplified: I take sound patterns that exist in languages and associated variation and usage patterns (who says what, how and when), and investigate the social meaning humans associate with these patterns (and how they come to make these associations). I care about how, cognitively, this social information affects attention, perception, recognition, memory, and comprehension. Then, I take all of that, and investigate the areas in which language and society interact and highlight how this advances theory, but also how stereotype and bias are reinforced through spoken language. Much of what we currently know about speech variation, language and cognition stems from experiments that probe one component of this process at time, leave out social factors and experience, use stimuli from normative white talkers, and are quite distant from the interdisciplinary and diverse research needed to advance theories and address issues relevant to society. My general focus is on understanding the mechanisms and representations that underlie spoken language understanding and how they interact across various listener and speaker populations in a social and dynamic world.