Some of my ongoing projects include:
- Language variation and change in Kansas: I am currently examining vowel mergers (including pin-pen and pre-l mergers), /ay/ raising, and the Low Back Merger Shift (LBMS) in Kansas,
with a particular focus on perception-production relationships, language change over time, and regional and social variability.
- In-group and out-group representations of linguistic variation: We are conducting ongoing work (including research to appear in American Speech with Tyler Hausthor and Jeff Holliday) on how in-group and out-group expectations about linguistic variation differ, and how these are updated over the lifespan with new dialect experience.
My previous work on this topic involves expectation-driven convergence toward Southern US monophthongal /ay/, which I found to be triggered by different cues for Southerners vs. Non-Southerners.
- Sociolinguistics in human-computer interaction: Everyday communication increasingly involves non-human AI interlocutors like smart devices and voice assistants. Ongoing work (some with Aini Li at City University of Hong Kong)
examines how people apply sociolinguistic knowledge about humans to AI voices. I am interested in whether people expect stylistic variation from AI voices, how they apply sociolinguistic stereotypes to AI voices,
and how these beliefs are evolve over time.
- Maching learning approaches to linguistic covariation: I have been exploring how machine learning approaches can be utilized to better understand covariation patterns and unite community-level and invidual-level approaches to linguistic variation (including ongoing work with Meredith Tamminga using hierarchical clustering to uncover socially meaningful patterns of Philadelphia dialect vowel covariation). Such approaches are useful for letting the linguistic data determine relevant social groupings (rather than imposing social categories on corpus data) and can uncover social patterning that would otherwise be hidden.
- Accommodation, Convergence, Alignment, and Priming: Speech accommodation, phonetic imitation, syntactic alignment, and lexical priming are all behaviors that illustrates our tendency for repetition in language use.
I am particularly interested in the cognitive and social mechanisms behind these behaviors, including what convergence (and especially expectation-driven convergence) can tell us about how linguistic and social knowledge is mentally represented,
how syntactic priming can be used to understand underlying grammatical structure, and how these seemingly different behaviors may share similar cognitive mechanisms.
2025
Lacey Wade, Tyler Hausthor, and Jeff Holliday. Accepted.
What makes a speaker sound
Kansan? It depends who you ask. American Speech. PDF
Bill Haddican, Marcel den Dikken, Meredith Tamminga, and Lacey Wade. Accepted.
English
particle verbs prime double object constructions in production. Linguistic Inquiry.
Lacey Wade. 2025. In-group/out-group dynamics, contrast, and the listening subject in
sociolinguistic perception.
Journal of Sociolinguistics (Invited Commentary). PDF
Lacey Wade and Meredith Tamminga. 2025.
Expectation-Driven Shifts in Perception and
Production. JASA. PDF
2024
Xin Gao and Lacey Wade. 2024. Rapid and Introspective Processing of Sociolinguistic Associations of (ING) in Context. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics. Proceedings from NWAV 51.
PDF
Lena Abirou, Aly Kerrigan, Jay Michell, and Lacey Wade. 2024. New and Changing Social Evaluations of All-lowercase and Exclamation Points. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference.
PDF
2023
Lacey Wade, David Embick, and Meredith Tamminga. 2023. Dialect experience modulates cue reliance in sociolinguistic convergence. Glossa Psycholinguistics 2, 1.
PDF
2022
Lacey Wade. 2022. Experimental evidence for expectation-driven linguistic convergence. Language 98, 1.
PDF |
Data
Meredith Tamminga & Lacey Wade. 2022. Coherence across social and temporal scales. In The Coherence of Linguistic Communities: Orderly Heterogeneity and Social Meaning. Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics (Eds. Karen Beaman and Gregory Guy).
PDF
Wei Lai, Lacey Wade, and Meredith Tamminga. 2022. Individual differences in simultaneous perceptual compensation for coarticulatory and lexical cues. Linguistics Vanguard.
PDF
2021
Lacey Wade, Wei Lai, and Meredith Tamminga. 2021. The reliability of individual differences in VOT imitation. Language and Speech 64, 3.
PDF
2020
Meredith Tamminga, Robert Wilder, Wei Lai, and Lacey Wade. 2020. Perceptual learning, talker specificity, and sound change. Papers in Historical Phonology 4, 90.
PDF
Lacey Wade. 2020. The Linguistic and the Social Intertwined: Linguistic Convergence toward Southern Speech. Doctoral Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania.
PDF
Lacey Wade & Gareth Roberts. 2020. Linguistic convergence to observed vs. expected behavior in an alien-language map task. Cognitive Science, 44(4), e12829.
PDF |
Data
2017
Lacey Wade. 2017. The role of duration in the perception of vowel merger. Laboratory Phonology, 8(1), 30.
PDF
2015
Lacey Wade. 2015. Multiple mergers: Production and perception of three pre-/l/ mergers in Youngstown, Ohio. PWPL Volume 21.2, Article 2.
PDF
2024
NWAV 52 Talk: "What makes a speaker sound Kansan?" With Tyler Hausthor. Slides
2023
PLC 47 talk: "Novel and changing social evaluations of all-lowercase and exclamation points." With Lena Abirou, Alexandra Kerrigan & Jay Michell. Slides
LSA poster: "Particle verbs prime double object constructions." With Bill Haddican, Marcel den Dikken, and Meredith Tamminga. Denver, CO.
2022
NWAV 50 project-launch talk: "Growing experience and changing sociolinguistic knowledge." Stanford University.
2021
NWAV 49 talk: "A hierarchical clustering approach to continuing and reversing sound changes" with Meredith Tamminga. University of Texas at Austin
NWAV 49 talk: "The role of dialect background in expectation-driven shifts in perception and production." University of Texas at Austin
2020
LSA talk: "Speakers converge toward variants they haven't heard: The case of southern monophthongal /ay/." New Orleans, LA. Slides
2019
NWAV 48 talk: "Accommodation to observed vs. expected behavior in a laboratory experiment" with Gareth Roberts. Eugene, OR. Slides
NWAV 48 talk: "The search for predictors of individual differences in VOT imitation"
with Meredith Tamminga and Wei Lai. Eugene, OR.
Meaning in Flux talk: "Accommodation to observed vs. expected behavior in an alien language"
with Gareth Roberts. Yale University.
2018
LSA talk: "Stability and variability in phonetic flexibility," with Meredith Tamminga and Wei Lai. Salt Lake City, UT.
2017
NWAV 46 talk: "Do speakers converge toward variants they haven't heard?" Madison, WI.
2016
NWAV 45 talk: "Phonetic vs. contextual cues in communication between merged and unmerged speakers." Vancouver, BC. Slides
SVALP poster: "The role of duration in perception of vowel merger." Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
2015
NWAV 44 talk: "The role of duration in perception of vowel merger." Toronto, ON.
ASA poster: "Production and perception among three competing pre-/I/ mergers." Pittsburgh, PA.
2014
NWAV 43 talk: "Multiple Mergers: Production and perception of three pre-/l/ mergers in Youngstown, Ohio." Chicago, IL.
SECOL 81 talk: "Production and perception of the pre-lateral, non-low, back vowel merger in Youngstown, Ohio." Myrtle Beach, SC.
UNC Chapel Hill Colloquium talk: "Production and perception of the pre-lateral, non-low, back vowel merger in Youngstown, Ohio."
KU Public Radio (Feb 19, 2024): "When Experts Attack! #54: People mimic Southern accents" Listen here
KU News (Jan 23, 2024): "For outsiders, stereotypes about Southern speech trump experience" Read here
The Conversation (May 20, 2022): "What makes us subconsciously mimic the accents of others in conversation" Read here
LSA (April 8, 2022): "Meet the Author Webinar" Watch here
Penn Today (April 5, 2022): "People imitate accent features they expect to hear, even without hearing them" Read here
Big Ideas for Strange Times (Nov 17, 2020): "What makes an accent good or bad?" Watch here
