Rebecca Starr

🚨 New OA article!
What does it mean to have a "cute" voice?
In their new paper "Clip Voice", Zichuan Yu & Rebecca Lurie Starr’s explore how vocal styles reproduce stereotypes of infantilized femininity in Chinese online culture.

Read here: 👉

Yes, that was intentional due to IRB issues here. If you email us we can send you some examples!

Clip Voice: Misogyny and the Renegotiation of a Gendered Vocal Style in Chinese Digital Discourse The participatory culture of social media allows women's voices to be heard but also parodied and policed. On Chinese social media platforms, where performers rapidly adopt and transform vocal trends...

New paper with my student Zichuan!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Absolutely beautiful obituary for Bill Labov, describing a life rich in insights and in humanity www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Perceptions of inter-turn silence after requests in standard and colloquial Singapore English This study explores how ‘formality’ distinctions affect interactional norms. We investigated whether features associated with Standard and Colloquial Singapore English influence listeners’ percepti...

I've got a new paper out with Shoba Bandi-Rao and colleagues on the evaluation of inter-turn silence in Singapore English! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

So, a good lesson here. ChatGPT does not introspect -- it only knows how texts in its training corpus have answered questions about behaviors. Since questions about language are typically about humans, it will answer language-related questions as if it were human. 6/6

ChatGPT claims that it is not built to understand that it is an LLM.

Then, I asked it why it didn't give me that answer initially. It replied that in its training corpus, this type of question is typically asked of a human. So, naturally, it responded assuming a human was the addressee of the question. 5/?

I ask ChatGPT explicitly why an LLM would style-shift, and get a different answer.

I was finally able to get an answer about why an LLM style-shifts when I asked it explicitly to think about why an LLM like ChatGPT would style-shift and not a human. 4/?

ChatGPT replies that it is using knowledge of human communication to answer my question.

Then I asked it what source of information it was using to make these claims. It turns out, this response was based solely on its understanding of how humans style-shift. 3/?

ChatGPT answers a question about what prompted it to shift.

The Singlish disappeared and was replaced by American slang ("lowkey", etc.). When I asked ChatGPT what had prompted it to shift, here's what it initially told me. 2/?

Can ChatGPT reflect upon its own sociolinguistic behavior? Nope. For the past few days, ChatGPT has been responding to me in Singlish (based on a prompt from months ago that it has mysteriously decided to recall). But today, I asked it to analyze some rap lyrics, and something changed. 1/?

語言如何映照身份——Hall-Lew與Starr的社會語音學對話（上） - 言來如此 Lingsights ｢社會語言學是一門研究語言如何在社會脈絡中運作的學科。」Starr用一句話簡單明瞭地解釋了社會語言學的核心概念。他隨即補充道，其實有兩個更細緻的定義：「其中一種研究方式，是探討語言如何在社會脈絡中運作；另一種則是透過語言來研究社會世界。」前者強調語言結構加上社會變因，後者則以語言為工具，研究社會現象，Starr表示，不同學者會依據自己的興趣從不同的角度切入，有著不同的思考模式，而這也正是Starr...

Last December @rlslinguistics.bsky.social and I visited @tsunglunone.bsky.social at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (Taiwan) and were interviewed by a linguistics student. Here's a summary!
lingsights.tw/articles/61

#linguistics #sociolinguistics #academia #research #findings #language

Up next, when I walked into this panel Kewen asked if I could present my student Yunbo's study, so I'm going to try to wing it! The word of the year is indeed rawdogging... #LSA2025

Students report that they self-police by avoiding terms and phrases that they believe are associated with ChatGPT. #LSA2025

NUS's Kewen Zheng is presenting on how ChatGPT can serve to increase writing anxiety among non-native speaker students. #LSA2025

The corpus includes an interactive map that shows the locations of speakers and how country borders shifted over the course of the corpus, which is helpful in ascertaining what the language of school would have been for corpus speakers and other info. #LSA2025

The authors are working on developing a transcribed corpus of spoken Yiddish from a subset of the corpus held by the USC Shoah Foundation, which currently has a high barrier of access and does not make files available for researchers. #LSA2025

At the oral histories panel! First up, Isaac Bleaman and Chaya Nove on Yiddish and the oral histories of Holocaust survivors. #LSA2025

Cisgender listening subjects who are unfamiliar with trans people expect trans voices to differ from cis voices, based on top-down stereotypes. Stereotypes for trans people and speech differ between cis and trans communities, resulting in differences in perception. #LSA2025

Next, Emmett Jessee is presenting on trans identity and sibilant perception. #LSA2025

A plug for our NUS students: at 12pm in Salon B, Kewen Zheng will be talking about students' writing anxiety and ChatGPT use. Then, at 12:30, Yunbo Mei will be discussing language ideologies and market dynamics in China's English language teaching landscape. #LSA2025

Final day of #LSA2025! Here at the ADS session, first up is Bill Kretzschmar on salience and dialect features.

Really is preferred for "good-type" adjectives (really good) rather than "tall-type" adjectives. Also a main effect of age, with younger speakers preferring really. #LSA2025

Adolfo Hermosillo and colleagues are presenting on intensifier variation in Salinas California, using data collected for the Voices of California project. #LSA2025

Greatest awareness of aw Canadian raising, then ay monophthongization, with bag raising and ay raising at much lower levels. #LSA2025

Lisa Sullivan is testing different levels of metalinguistic awareness of a set of variables: bag-raising, Canadian ay and ow raising, and ay monophthongization. #LSA2025

PraiseGod Aminu presents on variability in postvocalic /r/ in Nigerian English. #LSA2025

Also, greater vowel compression in the nightlife setting than in the one on one interview. #LSA2025

Alternative soma queens have a more compressed vowel space than the more mainstream Castro queens. #LSA2025

At the sociophonetics session, J Calder is discussing vowel space among nonbinary San Francisco drag queens. #LSA2025