education
🔜 2016–present, PhD in Linguistics, University of British Columbia (Title: Cross-language (dis)similarity in Cantonese-English bilingual speech production; Chair: Molly Babel)
⚙️ 2019, LSA 2019 Linguistic Institute, University of California, Davis (Courses: Advanced Statistics and Data Analysis, The Bilingual Brain, Introduction to Prosody, and Information-Theoretic Approaches to Linguistics)
🎓 2013, BA in Linguistics, University of Washington, Magna Cum Laude
primary research interests
- variation in speech production and perception
- psycholinguistics of bilingualism (i.e., crosslinguistic influence, perceptual learning, talker identification and discrimination, listener biases, etc.)
- bilinguals as a locus of contact-induced sound change
- probabilistic reduction as an outcome of linguistic experience
selected research methods
- corpus phonetics
- experimental design (lab/online)
- bayesian statistics
- exploratory data analysis
data sets
🔜 SpiCE: A corpus of Speech in Cantonese and English. [documentation]
papers
🔜 Johnson, K. A., Mellesmoen, G., & Babel, M. Truthfulness judgements are negligibly affected by social evaluations of talkers. Manuscript almost complete!
🔜 Babel, M., Johnson, K. A., & Sen, C. Asymmetries in perceptual adjustments to non-canonical pronunciations. Manuscript under review. [preprint]
🔜 Johnson, K. A. & Babel, M. Language contact within the speaker: Phonetic variation and crosslinguistic influence. Manuscript under review.
Johnson, K. A., Babel, M., & Fuhrman, R. A. (2020). Bilingual acoustic voice variation is similarly structured across languages. Proceedings of Interspeech 2020, 2387–2391. doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2020-3095 [open-access paper] [code]
Johnson, K. A., Babel, M., Fong, I., & Yiu, N. (2020). SpiCE: A new open-access corpus of conversational bilingual speech in Cantonese and English. Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 4089–4095. [open-access paper]
Chan, L., Johnson, K. A., & Babel, M. (2020). Lexically-guided perceptual learning in early Cantonese-English bilinguals. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 147(3), EL277–EL282. doi:10.1121/10.0000942 [open-access paper]
Johnson, K. A. (2019). Probabilistic reduction in Spanish-English bilingual speech. Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 1263–1267. [open-access paper]
Johnson, K. A., Mellesmoen, G. M., Lo, R. Y.-H., & Gick, B. (2018). Prior pronunciation knowledge bootstraps word learning. Frontiers in Communication, 3. doi:10.3389/fcomm.2018.00001 [open-access paper] [materials]
Bliss, H., Johnson, K. A., Burton, S., Yamane, N., & Gick, B. (2017). Using multimedia resources to integrate ultrasound visualization for pronunciation instruction into postsecondary language classes. Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching, 8(2), 173–188. [open-access paper]
invited talks
Johnson, K. A. (2021). SpiCE: A new open-access corpus of conversational bilingual speech in Cantonese and English. New Empirical Contributions to Cantonese Linguistics and Language Processing, Virtual, February 28. [slides]
Johnson, K. A. (2020). Bilingual acoustic voice variation is similarly structured across languages. Presentation for the UBC Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing Reading Group, December 16. [slides]
Johnson, K. A. (2019). Building a Cantonese-English bilingual speech corpus. PhDs Go Public Research Talk Series: Bridging Communities. Vancouver Public Library—Central Branch, Vancouver, Canada, April 26. [talk]
conference presentations
🔜 Johnson, K. A. & Babel, M. (2021, Accepted). Uniformity and crosslinguistic influence in Cantonese-English bilingual stops. The 3rd International Symposium on Bilingual and L2 Processing in Adults and Children, Virtual, June 3-4. [abstract]
Johnson, K. A. & Babel, M. (2020). The role of passage length in acoustic voice variability in bilingual speech. The 179th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Virtual, December 7–11. [poster] [materials]
Lloy, A., Johnson, K. A., & Babel, M. (2020). Bilingual talker identification with spontaneous speech in Cantonese and English: The role of language-specific knowledge. The 179th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Virtual, December 7–11.
Johnson, K. A., Babel, M., & Fuhrman, R. A. (2020). Bilingual acoustic voice variation is similarly structured across languages. Interspeech 2020, Virtual, October 25–29. [recording]
Johnson, K. A. & Babel, M. (2019). Bilingual sibilant acoustics in conversational Cantonese-English speech. The 178th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, San Diego, USA, December 2–6. [poster]
Chan, L., Johnson, K. A. & Babel, M. (2019). Lexically-guided perceptual learning in Cantonese-English bilinguals: A web replication study. The 178th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, San Diego, USA, December 2–6. [poster]
Johnson, K. A. (2019). Probabilistic reduction in Spanish-English bilingual speech. The 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, August 5–9. [slides]
Cheng, L., Johnson, K. A. & Babel, M. (2018). Bilingual word familiarity in Cantonese and English. The 178th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Victoria, Canada, November 5–9. [poster]
Johnson, K. A., Mellesmoen, G., Lo, R. Y.-H., & Gick, B. (2017). Help or hinder? The complicated role of pronunciation knowledge in word learning. The Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching 9th Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, USA, September 1–2.
Still reading? Here’s a pdf version of my cv.