The Blue Ridge Mountains form part of the mystique around the Appalachian region.
The Blue Ridge Mountains form part of the mystique around the Appalachian region.

My research has two main foci: language variation and change, particularly in the varieties of English in the Southern United States, and the perception of phonetic processes. My work has examined variation in the Appalachian region, with an emphasis on vocalic and intonational variation. I examine the effect that socio-indexical aspects of individuals have on various phonetic processes. Also, I have investigated various phonetic processes and how they affect or impact the perception and processing of speech. Some of these processes are locus equations, the impact of noise, how signal degradation and speech rate affects connected speech perception, and syllable structure.

Other areas of interest are statistical analysis, particularly mixed effects models and other hierarchical linear models. I have served as a statistical consultant for several projects, from the acquisition of spelling to lipreading.

Outside of my phonetic work, I have investigated other aspects of the linguistics of Southern American English, primarily the syntax of multiple modals, negation, and auxiliary movement. In a related vein, I am the co-director, with Michael Montgomery, of MultiMo, a searchable database of published and unpublished tokens of multiple modals.

Here, you can find materials relevant to my published research and presentations.

I provide full links for these papers that have appeared and to presentations and posters.
My CV contains more information about other projects that are in various stages of the publication process.

Publications

Articles

Burdin, Rachel Steindel, Nicole R. Holliday, and Paul E. Reed. 2022. American English pitch accents in variation: Pushing the boundaries of Mainstream American English ToBI conventions. Journal of Phonetics 94

Hendricks, Allison E., Mikayla Watson-Wales, and Paul E. Reed. 2021. Perceptions of African American English by students in speech-language pathology programs. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 30(5), 1962-1972.

Blanchette, Frances K., Paul E. Reed, Erin Flannery, and Carrie Jackson. 2020. Linguistic diversity in Appalachia: The case of negative auxiliary inversion. American Speech 95(3), 297-320.

Reed, Paul E. 2020. Inter- and intra-regional variation in intonation: An analysis of rising pitch accents and rootedness. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 147(1), 616-626.

Reed, Paul E. 2020. Place and language: Links between speech, region, and connection to place. WIREs Cognitive Science 11(60).

Reed, Paul E. 2020. Prosodic variation and rootedness in Appalachian English. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 25(2).

Reed, Paul E. 2020. The importance of rootedness in the study of Appalachian English: Case study evidence for a proposed rootedness metric. American Speech 95(2), 203-226.

Werfel, Krystal, Melanie Schuele, and Paul E. Reed. 2019. Linguistic contributions to spelling accuracy in elementary children with SLI. American Journal of Speech Language Pathology 28(2), 599-611.

Burdin, Rachel Steindel, Nicole Holliday, and Paul E. Reed. 2018. Rising above the standard: Variation in L+H* contour use across 5 varieties of American English. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 9, 354-358.

Reed, Paul E. 2018. The importance of Appalachian identity: A case study in rootedness. American Speech 93(3-4).

Hay-McCutcheon, Marcia, Paul E. Reed, and Spyridoula Cheimariou. 2018. Positive social interaction and hearing loss in older adults living in rural and urban communities. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 61, 2138-2145.

Montgomery, Allen A., Paul E. Reed, Kimberley A. Crass, H. Isabel Hubbard, and Joanna Stith. 2014. The effects of measurement error and vowel removal on the locus equation measure of coarticulation. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 136(5), 2747-2750.

Reed, Paul E. 2014. Inter- and intra- generational monophthongization and Southern Appalachian identity. Southern Journal of Linguistics 38(1), 159-193.

Book Chapters

Reed, Paul E. 2020. Phonological possibilities in Appalachian English. In Appalachian Englishes in the 21st Century. Ed. Kirk Hazen. Morganton, WV: WVU Press, pp.20-35.

Reed, Paul E. 2018. Appalachia, monophthongization, and intonation: Rethinking tradition. In Language Variety in the New South: Contemporary Perspectives on Change and Variation Eds. Jeffrey Reaser, Eric Wilbanks, Karissa Wojcik, and Walt Wolfram. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, pp.97-112.

Book Reviews

Reed, Paul E. 2018. Review of What you are getting wrong about Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte and Ramp Hollow by Steven Stoll. Journal of the Working Class Studies Association 3(2), 113-116.

Reed, Paul E. 2014. Defining the field: A comprehensive introduction to sociophonetics. Review of Sociophonetics: An Introduction by Erik R. Thomas. American Speech 89(1), 111-114.

Outreach Publications

Reed, Paul E. 2016. Mountain Talk. Tar Heel Junior Historian Magazine Spring

Submitted Papers

Reed, Paul E. Under revision. Appalachian Englishes in The New Encyclopedia of World Englishes. Blackwell.

Baese-Berk, Melissa, and Paul E. Reed. Under review. Addressing diversity in speech science courses. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Blanchette, Frances K., Carrie Jackson, Erin Flannery, and Paul E. Reed. Under review. Adaptation at the syntax-semantics interface: Evidence from a vernacular construction. Language and Speech.

Childs, Becky, and Paul E. Reed. Under review. The English of the Southern United States. In New History of the English Language. Cambridge University Press.

Selected Recent Presentations and Posters

Holliday, Nicole R., and Paul E. Reed. 2022. Watch your tone: Race, gender, and voice quality in automated ‘tone of voice’ evaluation. Paper presented at Sociolinguistics Symposium 24 in Ghent, Belgium. July 13-16.

Reed, Paul E. 2022b. Meaningful places: College students, rootedness, and the Southern Vowel Shift. Paper presented at the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) 89. Virtual meeting (hosted by Louisiana State University).

Reed, Paul E. 2022a. The Southern Vowel Shift and meaningful places: How attachment to place affects vowel production among college students. Paper presented at the American Dialect Society (ADS) Annual Meeting. Virtual meeting.

Farrington, Charlie, Chloe Tacata, and Paul E. Reed. 2021. A American English variant: Indefinite article variation in American English. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 49. Virtual meeting (hosted by the University of Texas).

Reed, Paul E. 2021b. Incorporating dialect diversity in the introductory phonetics classroom: The class is the data. Paper presented at the Acoustical Society of America Spring Meeting. Virtual meeting.