Tamminga Lab - People

Who’s around?

Headshot of a white woman with wavy light brown hair, wearing an olive blouse. Meredith Tamminga is the lab director and an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Penn. She is also the Graduate Chair for Linguistics, an Associate Editor at Language, and a 2023-24 Penn Fellow.

Headshot of a white man with short dark hair and glasses, wearing a blue tshirt. Andrea Beltrama is a lecturer and postdoc. He is interested in understanding how interlocutors assemble, signal and interpret meanings across the semantic, pragmatic and social dimensions of communication. He investigates this question through the lenses of different phenomena such as (im)precision; gradability and scalarity; subjective and emotive language; and human-AI interaction.

Headshot of a white man with short curly brown hair and glasses, wearing a blue sweater and maroon scarf. Cesko Voeten is a postdoc in linguistics working with Meredith Tamminga and Joshua Plotkin (Biology & Mathematics). His research is concerned with the relationship between synchronic variation and diachronic change in vowel systems, and with statistical methods that enable this relationship to be quantified. In his current project, he uses a statistical model from biological evolution to investigate the population-level processes underlying vowel changes in Philadelphia.

Headshot of a white man with a long brown ponytail, wearing glasses and a black turtleneck. Lefteris Paparounas is a 5th year Ph.D. student in Linguistics (advisor: Dave Embick). His main focus is on theoretical syntax and morphology. He is interested in integrating theoretical insights in these areas with experimental perspectives, particularly in morphological processing and lexical access as probed through the lens of priming.

Headshot of an Asian woman with chin length black hair and bangs, wearing a yellow sweater and blue scarf. Aini Li is a 4th year Ph.D. student in Linguistics (advisor: Meredith Tamminga). Her research interests are at the interface of sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. In particular, she is using experimental methods to probe the influence of grammatical, social and cognitive factors on the perception and production of variation.

Headshot of a white woman with long curly red hair, wearing a cream turtleneck. Gwen Hildebrandt is a 4th year Ph.D. student in Linguistics (advisor: Charles Yang). She is broadly interested in syntax, acquisition, semantics, and psycholinguistics. Her second qualifying paper began an investigation into the acquisition and social meaning of Korean honorifics.

Headshot of an Asian woman with long dark hair wearing a white button-up and black jacket. May Chan is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in Linguistics (advisor: Jianjing Kuang). Broadly speaking, she is interested in speech production in World Englishes. Lately, she has been working on systematic biases in English-ASR systems modulated by speakers’ language backgrounds. She has also been working on how sociolinguistic factors condition pitch use in speech production in conversational data.

Headshot of an Asian woman in a white windbreaker holding an apple. Someone is playfully holding up bunny ears behind her head. Xin Gao is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in Linguistics (advisor: Mark Liberman). Her research interests include phonetics and sociolinguistics. She is particularly interested in speech production, speech perception, and voice quality variation.

Headshot of a Black non-binary person with glasses and piercings standing behind a flower. Mikaela Martin is a first year Ph.D. student in Linguistics (advisor: Meredith Tamminga). Their research interests include sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and semantics. Broadly speaking, Mikaela is focused on the psycho-social underpinnings of language, and group membership.

Headshot of a multiracial man with facial hair, a mustache, and glasses, wearing a shirt and tie. Wesley Mark Lincoln is a first-year Ph.D. student in Linguistics (advisor: Gareth Roberts). His interests are centred around sociophonetic variation and change, and the modelling of these phenomena using evolutionary biological theories. He is interested in Romance and Germanic languages and the languages of his native Singapore.

Headshot of a white woman with wavy dark hair, a nose ring, and a necklace. Her hand is under her chin and she is in a restaurant. Sophie Faircloth is a Bachelors and Masters student in Linguistics (advisor: Meredith Tamminga). Her research interests are at the intersection of sociolinguistics and pragmatics. She is particularly interested in exploring how persona information and regional dialect variation impact the social evaluation of speakers engaging in pragmatic behavior such as sarcasm usage and underinformativeness.

Old friends

Lacey Wade completed her Ph.D. in 2020 and was a postdoc in the lab from 2020-2022. She is now an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kansas.
Yiran Chen completed her Ph.D. in 2023 and is now a post-doctoral fellow in Psychology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.
Wei Lai completed her Ph.D. in 2021. She is now a Language Engineer at Amazon.
Ruaridh Purse completed his Ph.D. in 2021. He is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Phonetics at the University of Michigan.
Yosiane White completed her Ph.D. in 2021. She is now an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at University College Utrecht.
Ava Creemers completed her Ph.D. in 2020. She is now a Research Policy Officer at the University of Amsterdam.
Sabriya Fisher completed her Ph.D. in 2018. She is now a Diana Chapman Walsh Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Wellesley College.
Amy Goodwin Davies completed her Ph.D. in 2018. She is now a Data Scientist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Duna Gylfadottir completed her Ph.D. in 2018. She is now a Linguist at Grammarly.
Betsy Sneller completed her Ph.D. in 2018. She is now an Assistant Professor of Sociolinguistics at Michigan State University.
Robert Wilder completed his Ph.D. in 2018. He is now a Data Scientist/Software Engineer at Oncora Medical.
Hezekiah Akiva Bacovcin completed his Ph.D. in 2017. He is now the Director of AI and R&D at Nexalogy.
Edward Rider-Bezerra completed his MA in 2017. He is now a Boost Services Consultant at Epic.
Eli Cooper was our lab coordinator from 2014-2017. She is now a Technical Solutions Specialist at OpenWeb.