Speech in the Silver State

valerie fridland is professor of linguistics in the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. As a sociolinguist, her main focus is on varieties of American English. Most of her research, with coinvestigator Tyler Kendall, investigates variation in vowel production and vowel perception across the Northern, Southern, and Western regions of the United States. This work explores links between social factors and speech processing. Her teaching areas include general linguistics, sociolinguistics, syntax, and language and gender. She also has a video lecture series entitled “Language and Society” released by The Great Courses. E-mail: [email protected].

tyler kendall is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Oregon. Several of his research projects examine language variation and change in Oregon and elsewhere in the United States. In collaboration with Valerie Fridland, he is engaged in a large-scale project investigating the relationship between vowel production and vowel perception in regional varieties of U.S. English. Much of his wider work focuses on corpora in and computational approaches to sociolinguistics. Along these lines, he is the developer of several sociolinguistic software projects, including the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project (SLAAP) and the Vowels.R package for the R programming language. He is author of the book Speech Rate, Pause, and Sociolinguistic Variation: Studies in Corpus Sociophonetics (2013, Pal-grave Macmillan). E-mail: [email protected].