Georgia Zellou

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About

Georgia Zellou is a leading voice in the cognitive science of speech perception and production, with a particular focus on how humans interact with synthetic voices. Her research bridges phonetics, psycholinguistics, and human-computer interaction, exploring how listeners process coarticulatory cues—like vowel nasalization—in both natural and text-to-speech (TTS) contexts. In her highly cited 2021 study, she demonstrated that listeners show partial compensation for coarticulatory nasality across concatenative and neural TTS, revealing nuanced perceptual differences between synthesis methods. Zellou’s work also investigates vocal accommodation to technology, showing in a 2023 paper that speakers adjust their speech patterns depending on the physical form of a TTS device (e.g., Amazon Echo vs. humanoid robot), with 12 citations highlighting its impact on understanding human-machine communication. Her 2024 study on social evaluation of TTS voices by adults and children further underscores her commitment to inclusive, developmental perspectives. With over 28 citations across these key papers, Zellou’s contributions are shaping how we design and evaluate synthetic voices, making her a pivotal figure in the future of spoken language technology.