Meredith Tamminga

Meredith Tamminga

Assistant Professor of Linguistics

Room 316-C, Third Floor, 3401-C Walnut St.

tamminga@ling.upenn.edu

Lab website

Personal website

How do we produce and perceive variability in language?

Professor Meredith Tamminga is a linguist who is interested in the intersection of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and theoretical linguistics.

Some of the fundamental questions that Professor Tamminga is interested in include:

  • How is intraspeaker variation represented in the mental grammar and constrained by grammar-external systems?
  • How does information about social context and speaker identity change how we perceive speech?
  • How do processes of language perception and production feed into long-term language change?

She has explored these questions by combining the quantitative study of variation in conversational speech with experimental methods from laboratory phonetics/phonology and psycholinguistics. The broad approach of Professor Tamminga’s lab is to integrate information about speakers’ naturalistic speech behavior with information about the same speakers’ performance on experimental tasks. She is also interested in sign language sociolinguistics and is collaborating with Dr. Jami Fisher (University of Pennsylvania) and Dr. Julie Hochgesang (Gallaudet University) on the Philadelphia Signs Project.

Professor Tamminga has published in journals including Language Variation and Change, the Journal of Phonetics, Linguistic Variation, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and Glossa. She received an NSF grant for her current project titled “Cognitive characteristics of the leaders of language change,” as well as an SAS Research Opportunity Grant for the Philadelphia Signs Project. She recently received the SAS Dean’s Award for Mentorship of Undergraduate Research.

Meredith Tamminga

Meredith Tamminga

Associate Professor of Linguistics

Room 316-C, Third Floor, 3401-C Walnut St.

tamminga@ling.upenn.edu

Lab website

Personal website

Selected Publications

Meredith Tamminga. 2018. Modulation of the following segment effect on English coronal stop deletion by syntactic boundaries. Glossa: A journal of general linguistics 3(1):86.

Meredith Tamminga, Laurel MacKenzie and David Embick. 2016. The dynamics of variation in individuals. Linguistic Variation 16(2):330–336.

Meredith Tamminga. 2016. Persistence in phonological and morphological variation. Language Variation and Change 28:335-356.

Meredith Tamminga, Chris Ahern and Aaron Ecay. 2016. Generalized Additive Mixed Models for intraspeaker variation. Linguistics Vanguard 2(s1):33-41.

Georgia Zellou and Meredith Tamminga. 2014. Nasal coarticulation changes over time in Philadelphia. Journal of Phonetics 47:18–35.