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Meghan Sumner

Associate Professor of Linguistics

B.A., University at Albany, Anthropology (1996)
Ph.D, Stony Brook University, Linguistics (2003)
Concentration Advising in:
Academic Appointments
Associate Professor, Linguistics
Member, Maternal & Child Health Research Institute (MCHRI)
Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations
Member, Acoustical Society of America
Fellow, Psychonomic Society
Member, American Academy of Science
Member, International Speech Association
Member, Linguistic Society of America
Organizer, Testing models of phonetics and phonology at the LSA Linguistic Institute (2011 - 2011)
Reviewer, Acta Psychologica
Reviewer, Applied Psycholinguistics
Reviewer, Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics
Reviewer, Cognition
Honors & Awards
Hellman Faculty Scholar, Stanford University (2008-2009)
Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching, Stony Brook University (2001)
Meghan Sumner received her PhD in Linguistics at Stony Brook University. After completing her PhD, she was an NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow in Cognitive Psychology. She has been at Stanford University since 2007, where she is now an Associate Professor of Linguistics and the Director of the Stanford Phonetics Lab, where she investigates variation and spoken language understanding.

Meghan’s research sits at the intersection of acoustic phonetics, language use and variation, social meaning, and cognitive psychology. She investigates attention, perception, recognition, memory, and comprehension within and across individuals, groups, and languages, aiming to understand how different components of spoken language understanding work together. She and her students are testing the predictions of and hope to contribute to the development of a dynamic adaptive socially-anchored model of spoken language understanding. For the past twenty years, her work has focused on diverse talker and listener populations, drawing on variation to address issues in linguistics and psychology related to representation, asymmetries in memory, social effects in spoken language recognition, familiarity, experience, and categorization.

She is currently a Stanford Impact Labs Design Fellow, working with public institutions and advocacy groups to apply language-based social science methods to increase protections for children living with domestic violence.

Contact

Research Interests