Curriculum Vitae

Kevin B. McGowan

1669 Patterson Office Tower
Lexington KY 40506-0027
USA

kbmcgowan@vowel.space
https://vowel.space/

Education

2006 - 2011

Ph.D. Linguistics, University of Michigan

Dissertation: The Role of Socioindexical Expectation in Speech Perception
Patrice Speeter Beddor & Steven P. Abney, co-chairs
Julie Boland, Benjamin Munson, & Robin Queen, committee members

2007

Linguistic Institute, Stanford University

1996

B.A. Linguistics, University of Michigan

Employment

2021 -

Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Kentucky

2015 – 2021

Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Kentucky

2013 – 2015

Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University
Meghan Sumner, PI

2011 - 2013

Lecturer, Department of Linguistics, Rice University

1997 - 2007

Webmaster, Web Production & Database Services Team Lead, Information Technology Division, University of Michigan

Professional Experience

2019

Invited Faculty, “Speech Perception”, Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute, University of California, Davis

2017

Invited Faculty, “Doing phonetics research” and “Eye tracking for linguistics research” Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute, University of Kentucky

2013

Invited Faculty, “Introduction to Praat” Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute, University of Michigan

2007 - 2010

Journal Assistant & Student Board Member, Language Learning Journal, Blackwell Publishing

2009 - 2010

Research Assistant, Professor Pam Beddor, Michigan Phonetics & Phonology Laboratory

2007 - 2008

Research Assistant, Professors Pam Beddor & A. Coetzee, Michigan Phonetics & Phonology Laboratory

1997 - 2007

Programmer &, System administrator, Manager of Web and Database production services, University of Michigan

1993 - 1994

Undergraduate Research Assistant, Professor Richard W. Bailey, Department of English, University of Michigan

Current Projects

  • Dynamic vowel perception, social information, and normalization: Listeners do not need F1/F2 vowel centers to perceive vowel quality (Strange et al., 1983) or regional identity (Takvoryan and McGowan, in press) in CVC stimuli. In the current phase of this project, we are revisiting empirical demonstrations and models of intrinsic vowel normalization in light of this flexibility of human speech perception to even fairly dramatic reductions in vowel information available to the listener.

  • Gender perception in voices: A consistent finding in our lab is that the speech percept is comprised of both a linguistic and a social aspect and that these aspects need not agree at any point in processing for perception to succeed. Building upon work from McGowan & Babel (2020) and Laycock & McGowan (2025), our lab is exploring this dual nature of the percept by manipulating both low (e.g. lexical, phonemic) and high (e.g. ideological, regard) aspects of stimuli and testing listener perceptions using an auditory Stroop task.

  • Integration and Assessment of large scale Automatic Speech Recognition in linguistics research: ASR systems (e.g. HTK, Kaldi) have been essential tools in phonetics and related fields for nearly two decades but forced alignment using these tools still requires time-consuming word-level transcriptions. Semi-supervised ASR systems trained on large scale speech data (e.g. OpenAI’s whisper, Otter.ai) have become useful tools for automatic generation of captions and speech transcription. We are building tutorials and scripts for adding these transcription tools to established workflows with a particular emphasis on the patterns of errors researchers can expect to encounter and best practices for minimizing the accumulation of errors across the pipeline.

  • Sound change actuation, coarticulation, and regional accent: Southern US varieties of English differ strikingly from other varieties in their systematic use of vowel internal spectral change (monophthongization of diphthongs, diphthongization or triphthongization of monophthongs). We are pursuing a hypothesis that this dynamism may interact with the perception of nasalized vowels (Beddor & Krakow, 1999) to offer a coarticulatory explanation (Beddor 2009) for why high front lax and mid front lax vowels might be more prone to have merged in these varieties and not others.

Publications

McGowan, K. B., & Takvoryan, S. (in press). The Perception of Linguistic Features. In M. Baranowski, P. De Dekker, & J. Nycz (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Research Methods in Sociophonetics. Oxford University Press.
Takvoryan, S., & McGowan, K. B. (in press). The dynamic, social specification of coarticulated vowels. In R. V. Roeder & G. Alfaraz (Eds.), Accent, attitudes, and sound change. Benjamins.
McGowan, K. B. (2026). Toward an ecologically valid theory of speech perception. In L. Hall-Lew & J. Nycz (Eds.), Sociophonetics: Implications for Phonetics and Phonology. Oxford University Press.
Namboodiripad, S., Kutlu, E., Babel, A., Babel, M., Baese-Berk, M., Bassuk, P. B., Block, A., Pérez, R. C., Carlson, M. T., Carraturo, S., Cheng, A., Cheng, L. S. P., Combiths, P., Foushee, R., Frederiksen, A. T., Grammon, D., Hayes-Harb, R., Higby, E., Kendro, K., … Wright, K. E. (2026). Finding our ROLE: How and why to reframe essentialist approaches to language. Cognition, 271, 106444. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106444
Babel, A. M., Campbell-Kibler, K., & McGowan, K. B. (2025). Introduction to the thematic issue. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 29(1), 44–58.
Laycock, K., & McGowan, K. B. (2025). Removing the disguise: The matched guise technique, incongruity, and listener awareness. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 29(3), 194–209. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12700
Barrett, R., Cramer, J., & McGowan, K. B. (2022). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the united states.
Babel, A., McGowan, K., & Enrı́quez Duque, P. (2021). Niveles de percepción de las vocales en contacto: El caso de una variedad de español andino en Bolivia. Traspasando Lo Lingü: Factores Esenciales En El Contacto de Lenguas.-(Lengua y Sociedad En El Mundo Hispánico; 48), 119–136.
Medeiros, D. J., Mains, P., & McGowan, K. B. (2021). Ceiling effects on weight in heavy NP shift. Linguistic Inquiry, 52(2), 426–440.
Baese-Berk, M. M., McLaughlin, D. J., & McGowan, K. B. (2020). Perception of non-native speech. Language and Linguistics Compass, 14(7), e12375.
McGowan, K. B., & Babel, A. M. (2020). Perceiving isn’t believing: Divergence in levels of sociolinguistic awareness. Language in Society, 49(2), 231–256.
McGowan, K. B., Johnson, M. T., Combs, A., & Soleymanpour, M. (2019). Acoustic, non-invasive measurement of velopharyngeal aperture using a high frequency tone. Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 755–759.
Beddor, P. S., Coetzee, A. W., Styler, W., McGowan, K. B., & Boland, J. E. (2018). The time course of individuals’ perception of coarticulatory information is linked to their production: Implications for sound change. Language, 94(4), 931–968.
McGowan, K. B. (2016). Sounding Chinese and listening Chinese: Awareness and knowledge in the laboratory. Awareness and Control in Sociolinguistic Research, 25–61.
McGowan, K. B. (2015). Social expectation improves speech perception in noise. Language and Speech, 58(4), 502–521.
Sumner, M., Kim, S. K., King, E., & McGowan, K. B. (2014). The socially weighted encoding of spoken words: A dual-route approach to speech perception. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 1015.
Beddor, P. S., McGowan, K. B., Boland, J. E., Coetzee, A. W., & Brasher, A. (2013). The time course of perception of coarticulation. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 133(4), 2350–2366.
McGowan, K. B. (2011). The role of socioindexical expectation in speech perception [PhD thesis]. University of Michigan.
McGowan, K. B. (2009). Aerodynamic modeling for concatenative speech synthesis. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 126(4_Supplement), 2222–2222.

Invited Talks & Colloquia

2026
Language, Conflict and Peace-Building Symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America — The Myth of Misperception: the quixotic quest for invariance in speech perception
2025
Central Kentucky Linguistics Conference — American Speech: Non-Traditional Data Sources for Sociolinguistic Inquiry with Julien Carrier, Jennifer Cramer, and Paul Reed
2024
Northwestern University — The listener as a source of Invariance
2024
Georgetown University — The listener as a source of sound change
2023
UK College of Health Sciences Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee's "Third Tuesdays" series with Rusty Barrett and Jennifer Cramer
2022
The Unversity of Kentucky — Some ways I've been wrong about speech perception (and how it's great, actually)
2019
University of Tennessee, Knoxville — Social expectation and speech perception: mismatch and alignment
2016
University of Michigan — “Subcategorical mismatches can be mismatches of phonetic, phonological, lexical, and social context”
2016
North Carolina State University — “Socially informed speech perception: context, congruency, and complications”
2016
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York — “Social knowledge and speech perception: mismatch and alignment”
2014
UC Berkeley, Phorum — “Perceiving isn't believing: listeners' expectation and awareness of phonetically-cued social information” with A.M. Babel
2012
Rice University — “Claims about processing require online tasks: disjunction of AXB and interview results in a Bolivian crossroads”
2012
University of Texas, Austin — “Social expectation and theories of speech perception” — Invited colloquium
2011
Rice University — “The role of socioindexical expectation in speech perception.”
2010
University of Michigan — “The perceptual time course of coarticulation” with P.S. Beddor
2009
University of Michigan — “Aerodynamic Modeling of Coarticulation Improves Concatenative Synthesis”

Presentations

2026
Takvoryan, S. and McGowan, K.B. Listeners can perceive regionally-accented vowels (with or without vowel centers) Poster at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America
2025
McGowan, K.B. The Heterogenous Speaker-Listener: On the Paradox of Non-convergence in Social Speech Perception 2025 Society for Linguistic Anthropology meeting, University of Chicago
2025
McGowan, K.B. and Takvoryan, S. Listeners do not need an F1/F2 target to perceive vowel quality or regional accentedness MidPhon 30, Indiana University
2023
Laycock, K.B. and McGowan K.B. We're worrying about the wrong thing: the matched guise technique and social speech perception MidPhon 28, Purdue University
2022
McGowan, K.B. The Limits of Perception 17th International Conference on Methods in Dialectology
2020
McGowan, K.B. and Jennifer Cramer Wildcat Voices: Capturing Linguistic Variation at UK 4th annual Commonwealth Computational Summit (CCS), Faculty Lightning Talks
2019
McGowan, K.B., Johnson, M.T., Combs, A., and Soleymanpoor, M. Acoustic, non-invasive measurement of velopharyngeal aperture using a high frequency tone. 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.
2019
McGowan, K.B., Johnson, M.T., Combs, A., and Soleymanpoor, M. Acoustic, non-invasive measurement of velopharyngeal aperture using a high frequency tone. Poster, 177th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America
2019
McGowan, K.B. and Johnson, M.T. Apparatus and procedure for ultrasound investigation of velopharyngeal port aperture. University of Kentucky, Igniting Research Collaborations Symposium
2018
Wright, K. and McGowan, K.B. Covert Segregation: Dialect Discrimination in the Housing Market. 54th meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society
2018
Wright, K. and McGowan, K.B. Covert Segregation: Investigating Dialect Discrimination in the Housing Market. 2nd place, Five Minute Linguist competition. 92nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America
2015
McGowan, K.B. and Sumner, M. A phonetic explanation of pronunciation variant effects. 89th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America
2015
Sumner, M., McGowan, K.B., D'Onofrio, A., and Pratt, T. The contribution of form and meaning to the processing of careful and casual speech. 89th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America
2015
Mains, P., McGowan, K.B., and Medeiros, D. Gradient acceptability by length in heavy NP shift. 89th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America
2015
Moores, N.P., McGowan, K.B., Sumner, M. and Frank, MC. Children use phonetically-cued talker information to infer speaker meaning. Poster, 89th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America
2014
Moores, N.P., McGowan, K.B., Sumner, M., and Frank, M.C. Children use phonetically-cued talker information to disambiguate similar objects. The 55th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, Long Beach, CA
2014
McGowan, K.B. Sumner, M., D'Onofrio, A., and Pratt, T. The contribution of form and meaning to the processing of careful and casual speech. 27th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Columbus, OH
2014
Sumner, M., Calder, J., D'Onofrio, A., McGowan, K.B., and Pratt, T. Top-down vs. bottom-up processing depends on the acoustic composition of an utterance. 88th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America
2013
Sumner, M.; D'Onofrio, A.; McGowan, K.; Pratt, T.; and Calder, J. Differences in the recognition of careful and casual speech. Poster, 166th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America
2013
McGowan, K.B. and Babel, A.M. Perception of Spanish in Contact: Bolivian listeners' expectation and awareness of socioindexical variation. Workshop on Sound Change Actuation, University of Chicago
2013
McGowan, K.B. Sounding Chinese and Listening Chinese: Imitation, Perception, and Awareness of Non-Native Phonology. Part of panel, Awareness \& control in sociolinguistic research. 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America
2012
Babel, A.M. and McGowan, K.B. Social Categorization and Levels of Awareness: A Cross-Disciplinary Study. Part of panel, Voices in Movement: Phonetic Border Crossings. American Anthropological Association annual meeting.
2012
McGowan, K.B. The influence of socioindexical expectations on speech perception in noise. 86th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America
2011
McGowan, K.B. The influence of socioindexical expectations on speech perception in noise. Poster, 162nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America
2011
McGowan, K.B. and Medeiros, D. J. Tongues don't twist —mental representations do. 85th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America
2011
McGowan, K.B. Are you experienced? Socio-indexical knowledge and naive listeners. Poster, 85th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America
2010
McGowan, K.B. Examining Listeners' Use of Sociolinguistic Information During Early Phonetic Judgments: Evidence from eye-tracking. New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV 39)
2010
McGowan, K.B. Listener Expectations and the Processing of Foreign-Accented Speech. Mid-Continental Workshop on Phonology (MCWOP 16)
2010
Beddor, P.S., McGowan, K.B., Boland, J., and Coetzee, A. The Perceptual Time Course of Coarticulation. Poster, Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 12)
2010
McGowan, K.B. Aerodynamic Modeling of Coarticulation for Unit Selection Synthesis. Poster, 84th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America
2009
Beddor, P.S., McGowan, K.B., Boland, J., and Coetzee, A. The Perceptual Time Course of Coarticulatory Nasalization. Poster, 158th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America
2009
McGowan, K.B. Aerodynamic Modeling for Concatenative Speech Synthesis. Poster, 158th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America
2008
McGowan, K.B. Pointwise Mutual Information and the Syllable Contact Law. Mid-Continental Workshop on Phonology (MCWOP 14)
2008
Coetzee, A. and McGowan, K.B. Allophonic cues to syllabification. CUNY Conference On The Syllable
1994
Bailey, R.W. and Kevin B. McGowan The Michigan Academy — “English in Michigan: A Century of Scholarship” with Richard W. Bailey

Teaching

University of Kentucky

Senior Capstone

Linguistics 495

Spring 2026
Phonetics

Linguistics 500

Fall 2015—2026
Speech Perception

Linguistics 517

Fall 2026
Computational Linguistics

Linguistics 511

Fall 2017—2021
Language in U.S. Society

Linguistics 331

Spring 2016—2026
Phonology

Linguistics 515

Spring 2017—2019
Introduction to R

Arts & Sciences 500

Spring 2016—2017
Sociophonetics

Linguistics 617

Spring 2016, Fall 2025
Introduction to Linguistics

Linguistics 221

Fall 2015—2016

Linguistic Society of America

Doing Phonetics Research

with Melissa Baese-Berk, Melinda Fricke, & Natasha Warner
LSA Linguistic Institute
Summer 2017, Lexington, KY
Eyetracking for linguistic research

LSA Institute
Summer 2017, Lexington, KY
Praat Scripting

LSA Annual Meeting Pre-Workshops
January 2015, Portland, OR

LSA Institute
Summer 2013, Ann Arbor, MI

Rice University

Computational Linguistics

Linguistics 409
Rice University, Department of Linguistics
Spring 2013
Introduction to Phonology

Linguistics 311/511 & Anthropology 323/523
Rice University, Department of Linguistics
Spring 2012 & Spring 2013
Advanced Phonology

Linguistics 427
Rice University, Department of Linguistics
Fall 2012
Hearing & Speech Perception, Graduate Seminar

Linguistics 555
Rice University, Department of Linguistics
Spring 2012
Introduction to the Scientific Study of Language

Linguistics/Anthropology 200
Rice University, Department of Linguistics
Fall 2011
Introduction to Phonetics

Linguistics/Anthropology 301/501
Rice University, Department of Linguistics
Fall 2011 & 2012

University of Michigan

Language & the Human Mind

Linguistics 209/Pyschology 242
Graduate Student Instructor for Professor Sam Epstein
University of Michigan, Department of Linguistics
Fall 2009
College Writing

English 125
University of Michigan, Department of English Language & Literature
Fall 2008
Introduction to Language

Linguistics 111
University of Michigan, Department of Linguistics
Spring 2008
Javascript Programming

Introductory JavaScript Programming Workshop
University of Michigan, School of Information
Winter 2006, Winter 2007
UNIX, perl programming, SQL, and various computing skills workshops

University of Michigan, Information Technology Division
1997 - 1999

Fellowships and Awards

2010 - 2011
Horace H. Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University of Michigan
2010
Humanities Candidacy Fellowship, University of Michigan
2008
National Science Foundation, Honorable Mention, Graduate Research Fellowship
2008
Pre-Candidate Research Grant, Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant, Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan
2007
Linguistic Society of America, LSA Linguistic Institute Fellowship, LSA Summer Institute, Stanford University
2006
NAACL Summer School, North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
2005 - 2006
Non-Traditional Fellowship, Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan

Grants

(submitted)

Dialects of Care: Human-Centered AI Design in Rural Health Contexts Mellon Concepts in Higher Learning with Jennifer Cramer, Dmitry Strakovsky, Chad Eby, and Caleb Williams submitted to

2019 - 2020

Wildcate Voices software development UK Vice President for Research, Research and Creative Activities Grant – $3,360 with Jennifer Cramer

2018 - 2019

Method and device for acoustic, non-invasive measurement of velopharyngeal aperture using a high frequency tone Igniting Research Collaborations grant, University of Kentucky OVPR, - $27,726 with Michael Johnson, Electrical and Computer Engineering

2016

Confucius Institute Faculty China Curriculum Development Grant - $1,000

Advising & Supervision

Stella Takvoryan
(2025) Listening to cursive: The roles of regional identity and folk beliefs in perceptual cue-weighting, MA thesis chair
Kaitlin Young
(2025) Cognate Facilitation and Processing in English-Speaking Learners of German, MA thesis co-chair with Brenna Byrd
Emily Remirez
(2024) Modeling the Role of Social Information in Speech Perception, UC Berkeley PhD thesis, co-chair with Keith Johnson
Nour Kayali
(2023) This Make Sense?”  The Effect of Congruent Guise in Regional Accent on Grammatical Acceptability Judgments, MA thesis chair
Jarred Brewster
(2021) Language Contact and Covert Prominence in the Sḥerēt-Jibbāli Language of Oman, MA thesis chair
Monica Chulde Guayasamin
(2021) Face Masks and Speech Perception: Emotions and Intelligibility Perceived by Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers, MA thesis chair
Kyler Laycock
(2021) The Influence of Socioindexical Information on the Speech Perception-Production Link  Evidence from a Shadowing Task, MA thesis chair
Ollie Combs
(2020) Relevant Angry Affect Slows Response Time To Commands, MA thesis chair
Robert Bell
(2019) Limón Patwa: A Perceptual Study to Measure Language Attitudes Toward Speakers of Patwa in Costa Rica, MA thesis co-chair
Mikhayla Sheeley
(2019) Linguistic Relativity and the L2 Learner: An Investigation of the Effects of L2 Grammatical Gender on L1 Conceptual Gender, Undergraduate honors thesis chair
Jaycee Taylor
(2019) Lexingtopn STEAM Academy High School Internship, Supervisor
Philip Barnett
(2018) A Markedly Different Approach: Investigating PIE Stops Using Modern Empirical Methods, MA thesis co-chair with Andrew Byrd
June Nielsen
(2018) Lexingtopn STEAM Academy High School Internship, Supervisor
Aidah Aljuran
(2017) “Listening with an Attitude”  The Role of Attitude on Native and Non-Native Intergroup Communication, MA thesis chair
Kelly E. Wright
(2017) The Reflection and Reification of Racialized Language in Popular Media, MA thesis chair
Kaitlyn Lee
(2016) The Perception of Creaky Voice  Does Speaker Gender Affect our Judgments?, MA thesis chair
Jo Mackby
(2016) Cries from The Jungle: The Dialogic Linguistic Landscape of the Migrant and Refugee Camps in Calais, France, MA thesis co-chair with Mark Lauersdorf
John Galindo
(2014) A psychoacoustic study of the influence of L1 lexical tone and pitch perception, Rice University, Qualifying Paper, chair
Penelope Howe
(2014) Investigation of cues to fricative voicing in dialects of Malagasy, Rice University, Qualifying Paper, chair
Hussein Hizazi
(2013) Formant Analysis of Jordanian Arabic Vowels: Emphasis Effect on F2 in Jordanian Arabic, Rice University, Qualifying Paper, chair
Ling Ma
(2013) Native Mandarin perception of English word boundary consonant overlap., Rice University, Qualifying Paper, chair
Mariama Mallah
(2013) Directed undergraduate research, Stanford University
Obi Nwabueze
(2013) The use of eye-tracking in speech perception research, Undergraduate Research
Sheri-Ann Peckham
(2013) Investigation of age-related perceptual plasticity using Jamaican Creole, Undergraduate Research
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External Reviewer

Service to the field

  • Language, Conflict, and Peacebuilding ## Selected Software Projects

 

  • CoSign, Open Source Web Single SignOn ( co-founder, developer )
  • ChomskyBot, Pseudo-random Sentence Generator and Gentle Mockery Engine
  • ldapweb, Web-based LDAP Directory Client
  • kpasswd.cgi, Web-based Kerberos password changer

Technologies

 

  • Eyelink II head-mounted eye tracker,EG2-PCX Electroglottograph, EVA 2 pneumotachograph, Zonare Ultrasound, Praat, Wavesurfer, OpenSesame, sox, etc.
  • Python, Perl, C, Bourne shell, JavaScript, awk, tcl, SQL, PL/SQL
  • RDBMS systems (Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL)
  • UNIX administration & programming (Linux, OpenBSD, MacOS, Solaris, etc.)
  • HTML, XML, CSS, LaTeX, Markdown, Typst

Professional affiliations

2009 -

Acoustical Society of America

2006 -

Linguistic Society of America