These positionality statements were developed for a paper in Applied Psycholinguistics. Not all authors are currently involved in the lab and positionality may change over time. However, these statements are representative of the variety of positions members of our lab hold.

Weissler, R. E., Drake, S., Kampf, K., Diantoro, C., Foster, K., Kirkpatrick, A., ... & Baese-Berk, M. M. (2023). Examining linguistic and experimenter biases through “non-native” versus “native” speech. Applied Psycholinguistics, 44(4), 460-474.

The authors of this paper are all members of the Speech Perception and Production Laboratory at the University of Oregon and include faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate students. The authors come from diverse linguistic, socioeconomic, and racial backgrounds and have had diverse experiences, which impact their perspectives, biases, and research interests.

Rachel Elizabeth Weissler is a Black biracial individual. She grew up in Los Angeles County in California, did high school in Burlington County in New Jersey, college in Montgomery County in Pennsylvania, grad school in Washtenaw County in Michigan, and now resides in Lane County in Oregon. Her idiolect reflects the places she has lived and people she’s spent time and interacted with. She is dedicated to understanding the intersection of linguistics, cognitive processing and how race and gender play into these. She engages with multiple methods, from neuroimaging to emotional prosody processing to better understand what knowledge people have about grammar in the broad sense, and what people do with that knowledge in both perception and production as it relates to English varieties in the U.S., particularly African American English. Her broad interests in normative language varieties versus otherized or minoritized ways of speaking inspires her interest in conceptualizing broadly ways to bring concepts of unfamiliar speech into the experimental frame. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oregon in linguistics, psychology, and Black studies.

Shiloh Drake is a white, educated woman who speaks Mainstream (white, middle-class) US English. While she has spent time living as a “non-native” speaker and learner in environments where non-English languages are dominant, she has spent most of her life in countries and institutions where the variety of English she speaks is perceived as prestigious and powerful. In her work, she uses primarily behavioral methods to investigate language learning and morphological processing through the lenses of psycholinguistics, communicative disorders, and sociolinguistics. She is a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics.

Ksenia Kampf is an immigrant white woman. She was born and grew up in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, and is of Russian, Ukranian and Jewish decent. Her native language is Russian. She came to the US in 2013 to pursue a Master’s degree in Teaching English as Second Language. Before starting her PhD in Linguistics at the University of Oregon she taught a variety of college level courses in Russian as a Foreign Language. Having lived in the US for the past 9 years, English has become become an inseparable part of her identity, however, she still considers herself a perpetual English learner. She empathizes with the obstacles immigrants face coming to the United States and the many stereotypes and stigmas that follow them, including those coming from being a non-native speaker in environments where English is the dominant language across institutions of power. In her research she uses corpus and behavioral data to study speech production and perception with a focus on speech disfluencies.

Carissa Anne Diantoro is an asian woman who grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia speaking Indonesian. She started learning English in grade school. Although English is integrated into many school curricula, it is not considered an official language in the country. At the age of 18, she went to college at the University of Oregon and is currently pursuing a PhD degree at the same university. She has also spent time learning multiple additional languages at the university. Most of her research is focusing on speech perception and production of language learners including multilingual speakers, specifically in the area of phonetics and prosody. Other work she has done include first language acquisition of prosody in children and adults.  

Kurtis Foster identifies as a white cisgender man. He grew up in Benton and Cole Counties, Missouri and speaks a standardized form of American English from the Midwest region of the United States. His childhood was spent in an area in which language contact between speakers of the dominant standardized American English and Amish and Mennonite speakers of Pennsylvania Dutch was a frequent occurrence. He has spent time as a second language learner in a context in which the language he was learning was the dominant form while living in Korea. He has spent most of his time in contexts in which his language variety is viewed as a prestige variety. His research approach involves using behavioral measures to explore speech perception in contexts in which interlocutors interact with language varieties they are unfamiliar with.

Audrey Kirkpatrick is an undergraduate, white, cisgender woman. She grew up in Portland, Oregon and speaks standardized American English. She has spent time as a non-native speaker where the language was dominant (Spanish) but for the majority of her life she has had the privilege to be in environments where English was the dominant language. She is interested in psycholinguistics, specifically how speakers perceive different varieties of the same language and their notions of it.

Isabel Preligera is an undergraduate, Asian biracial woman who speaks Mainstream US English. She grew up in Portland, Oregon in a household where the only language spoken is Tagalog, she understands the language, but cannot speak. She has spent time being the non-native speaker her entire home life, and has spent time being the native speaker everywhere else. She is interested in research surrounding psycholinguistics. 

Orion Wesson is an undergraduate, white, transmasculine individual. He grew up in the Portland metropolitan area in Oregon, and grew up speaking the standard American English that’s spoken in the Pacific Northwest. He’s had the privilege to grow up in an area where that language is dominant, but is also interested in learning multiple second languages. He has mainly studied Japanese and Spanish. He’s interested in the intersection between queer studies and linguistics. 

Anna Wood is an undergraduate, adopted Chinese, queer woman. She grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii and grew up with multi-generational immigrant peers and community members. While speaking standardized American English growing up, she often experienced Hawaiian pidgin influenced speech and how this interacted with ideas of language prestige. She has studied Mandarin and German, both high prestige variants, and is working toward a BA in Linguistics and German Studies. She is interested in how identity and language interact, as well as ensuring discourse around academic fields is accessible.

Melissa Michaud Baese-Berk identifies as a white, educated, cisgender woman, and identifies as speaking a standardized form of American English, often associated with individuals sharing her demographic characteristics. While she has also identified as a learner of a variety of languages, and has spent time as a “non-native” speaker in environments where those languages are dominant (e.g., a Spanish learner living in Spain), she has spent most of her life in environments where her language variety is the dominant form across institutions of power. She uses behavioral methods to investigate speech perception, speech production, and language learning across a wide array of language varieties.