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.