I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UC Davis.

I am a phonetician, mostly interested in speech perception. I am interested in questions like:

  • How do you know what speech sounds you are listening to?
  • How can you tell how big/small young/old someone is from their voice?
  • What does it mean to ‘sound’ like a ‘woman’ or a ‘man’?
  • How does speech perception relate to the perception of speaker characteristics?

I investigate these topics using behavioral experiments (I play speakers a sound and ask them, what did you hear?), and using statistical models to investigate the results. 

I also write software for phonetic analysis, lately focused on formant tracking.

I can be contacted at sbarreda@ucdavis.edu, or found at 265 Kerr Hall.