I am a postdoctoral associate in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. My research focuses on questions about language processing and production at the interface of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Some of the big picture questions that I address in my research include:

How are linguistic representations shaped by the fact that language happens in a social context?
How do people dynamically adjust their perception and production of linguistic categories in response to the environment (e.g., perceptual learning, linguistic alignment)?
How are linguistic knowledge and social knowledge stored and accessed?
How do inferences about the talker and social identity condition inferences about linguistic categories?

To address these questions, I combine psycholinguistic experimentation and advanced statistical modeling with tools, techniques and insights from sociolinguistics, social perception and cognition, perceptual and distributional learning theories, probability theory, Bayesian inference, computational modeling, phonetics, and syntax. [read more…]

Contact Information

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
University of Rochester
Meliora Hall, Box 270268
Rochester, NY 14627

email: kweatherholtz@bcs.rochester.edu
   phone: +1-585-275-0751
fax: +1-585-442-9216
   office: Meliora Hall 303B
   Academia.edu page

Publications

Peer-reviewed articles

Weatherholtz, K. & Jaeger, T. F. (to appear). Speech perception and generalization across talkers and accents. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics.

Weatherholtz, K., Campbell-Kibler, K., & Jaeger, T. F. (2014). Socially-mediated syntactic alignment. Language Variation and Change, 26(3), 387-420. doi: 10.1017/S0954394514000155.

Work in progress

Jaeger, T. F., & Weatherholtz, K. (under review). What the heck is salience? How predictive language processing contributes to sociolinguistic perception.

Weatherholtz, K., Seifeldin, M., Kleinschmidt, D. F., Kurumada, C., & Jaeger, T. F. (under review). Speech perception as probabilistic inference under uncertainty based on social-indexical knowledge.

Weatherholtz, K. & Clopper, C. G. (in prep.). Adaptation to systemic phonological variation: Evidence for generalization across talkers and vowel shift systems

PhD Thesis

Weatherholtz, K. (2015). Perceptual learning of systemic cross-category vowel variation. PhD thesis. The Ohio State University.

Select Presentations

Weatherholtz, K., Liu, L. & Jaeger, T. F. (2015) Rapid accent adaptation and constraints on cross-talker generalization. Poster presented at the 29th annual CUNY conference on Human Sentence Processing, Gainesville, Florida, March 3-5. [poster]

Weatherholtz, K., Campbell-Kibler, K, & Jaeger, T. F. (2014). Syntactic alignment and the mediating role of social perception and higher-order social cognition. Poster presented at the International Workshop on Language Production, Geneva, July 16-18th. [poster]

Weatherholtz, K., Walker, A., Melvin, S., Royer, A., & Clopper, C. G. (2014). Effects of experience and expectations on adaptation to dialect variation in noise. Poster presented at the 27th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Columbus, Ohio, March 14-15th. [poster]

Research

descriptions of on-going projects coming soon…

Teaching

LING 7890.10: Mixed-Effects Regression Modeling (co-instructor; Ohio State University)
LING/PSYCH 371: Language and the Mind (instructor; Ohio State University)
BCS 206: Undergraduate Research in Cognitive Science (project mentor; Univ. of Rochester)
ENG 4343: Introduction to Linguistics (TA; University of Central Oklahoma)