Michelle Cohn

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About

Michelle Cohn is a leading voice in the interdisciplinary study of speech perception, human-computer interaction, and sociophonetics. Her research focuses on how listeners perceive and socially evaluate synthetic speech, particularly text-to-speech (TTS) voices, and how speakers unconsciously adapt their own speech when interacting with technology. In her highly cited 2021 study, she demonstrated that listeners only partially compensate for coarticulatory vowel nasalization in neural TTS compared to concatenative systems, revealing critical perceptual differences in synthetic speech generation. Her 2023 work on vocal accommodation showed that the physical form of a device—from an Amazon Echo to a humanoid robot—significantly influences how speakers shadow and align with TTS voices, with more human-like forms eliciting greater accommodation. Most recently, her 2024 study explored how both adults and children socially evaluate synthetic voices, uncovering developmental differences in voice perception. With over 28 citations across her key works, Cohn’s research bridges phonetics, cognitive science, and human-robot interaction, offering foundational insights for designing more natural and socially acceptable speech technologies. Her work is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of voice interfaces and the psychology of human-machine communication.