Principal Investigator

Susannah Levi, Lab Director Dr. Levi is a Professor in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at NYU. She completed her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Washington and a post-doctoral position in the Speech Research Lab in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. Her work examines the perception of talkers’ voices and the relationship between the talker and linguistic dimensions of the speech signal. Current research in the lab examines how familiarity with a talker improves spoken language processing and the relationship between language and reading ability on the perception of a talker information.

Doctoral Students

Sarah Bellavance Sarah is a PhD candidate in the Communicative Sciences and Disorders department at NYU. Sarah completed their M.S. in Linguistics at Georgetown University and B.A. in Linguistics at the University of Vermont. Sarah’s research primarily focuses on the voice, including the acoustic and aerodynamic qualities of vocal hyperfunction and social perceptions of various voice qualities. Their current work centers around vocal fry, with other research interests more broadly in acoustic phonetics, sociolinguistics, and child speech/language development.

Line Lloy stuff.

Research Assistants​​

	Yana Dalbir Yana Dalbir is currently in NYU’s MS program for Communicative Sciences and Disorders. She is pursuing a career as a speech-language pathologist, and her primary research interests are sociolinguistics and language variation.
	Benjamin Parkhurst Ben is a linguistics student at Columbia University, focusing on acoustic phonetics, sociolinguistics, and language documentation. In addition to working on the speaker familiarity project at the lab, he investigates rates of uptalk in different social contexts, as well as speaker judgments of adverbial calques in Miami English.
	Charly Rentz Charly Rentz is currently pursuing a B.M. in Vocal Performance, concentrating in classical voice, with a minor in Communicative Sciences and Disorders. Her interests lie in the intersection of music and vocal health, specifically in vocal habilitation and rehabilitation. She performs regionally with the Regina Opera Company (Brooklyn, NY) and holds a student assistant position within NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Music and Performing Arts.

Lab Alumni

Sandy Abu El Adas, SUNY Stony Brook
Julie Case, Hofstra
Nichole Houle, SUNY Binghamton
Heather Kabakoff, NYU Langone
Jai Peña, Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing
Mara Steinberg Lowe, Queens College CUNY