Nancy Niedzielski joined the faculty in the Linguistics Department in 1999. During that time, she has had teaching and research affiliations with the University of Edinburgh, the University of Vienna, and the University of Flensburg. In addition, she has worked as a consultant on the Robonaut Project for NASA, a forensic linguist for various jurisdictions in the US, and directed a training program on language varieties for KIPP Academy in Houston. Prior to coming to coming to Rice, she worked for several years as a speech scientist and the Speech Technology Laboratory for Panasonic Technologies, Inc., on several projects involving automated speech recognition and speech synthesis, and she received three US Patents during her tenure with that company. She has served on as an Executive Council member for the American Dialect Society, and the Committee on Social and Political Concerns for the Linguistics Society of America.
Research Areas
Sociolinguistics and sociophonetics, especially as they relate to speech perception. Applied sociophonetics, particularly the effect of language variation on speech science, speech remediation, artificial intelligence, and education. Linguistic theory and language variation, as they relate to language and the law. Folk linguistics, language attitudes, and language regard.
Education
Ph. D. University of California, Santa Barbara 1997
M. A. Eastern Michigan University 1989
B. S. Eastern Michigan University 1987
Societies & Organizations
American Dialect Society
Acoustical Society of America
Linguistics Society of America
International Pragmatics Association