Jeanne Brown

Hi there

I’m Jeanne [ʒan] Brown, a third-year PhD student in Linguistics at McGill University. My research lies at the intersection of phonetics and sociolinguistics (sociophonetics), with a particular focus on voice quality—especially creaky voice—and how it interacts with speaker identity, including gender, age, and language background. I combine experimental and corpus-based methods to examine how fine-grained phonetic variation is produced and perceived, and how it becomes socially meaningful.

My academic journey

I grew up in Ottawa where I completed by BA in Psychology and Linguistics as well as my MA in Linguistics at the University of Ottawa. My master’s memoire as well as subsequent work, supervised by and in collaboration with Dr. Marc Brunelle, explored voicing and register in Northern and Southern Raglai (minority language varieties spoken in Vietnam) as it relates to sound change. Alongside my laboratory phonology research, I also gained training within a variationist sociolinguistic framework, studying variation in Laurentian French (within the scope of Dr. Shana Poplack’s graduate courses) and English-French bilinguals’ speech (working for Dr. Stephen Levey). During my time at the University of Ottawa, I was a member of the Sound Patterns Laboratory and of the Sociolinguistics Laboratory.

At McGill, I am affiliated with the Montreal Computational and Quantitative Linguistics Lab (MCQLL) and the Speech Learning Lab—supervised by Dr. Morgan Sonderegger and Dr. Meghan Clayards. My current work includes sociophonetic studies of creaky voice, investigating its acoustic variation across gender, age, and language (Canadian English and Laurentian French), as well as its perception as a function of pitch and perceived speaker gender. I maintain an OSF page to archive ongoing projects.