Overview
Dr. Tyler Kendall is the Research Director at Duke Law's Wilson Center for Science and Justice.
Tyler is an experienced research administrator and researcher in the language sciences. He earned his PhD in English Linguistics at Duke in 2009. He then held a post-doc appointment in Linguistics at Northwestern University before moving to the University of Oregon, where he was Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Language Variation and Computation Lab. His research on language variation and change, and infrastructure work to expand methods and data for spoken language research, has been supported by several NSF grants, as well as by other international funding agencies. He publishes on a range of topics from the management and analysis of spoken language data, to computational methods in language and speech analysis, to interrelationships between speech perception and production, to language in legal contexts, and to the historical development of current American English dialects. He has developed several major language resources including the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project at NC State University and the Corpus of Regional African American Language at the University of Oregon.
From 2019-2022, Tyler served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation where he managed three programs in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences in the Directorate of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences and served on several cross-directorate working groups.
Recent Publications
Exploring the anatomy of articulation rate in spontaneous English speech: relationships between utterance length effects and social factors
Conference Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH · January 1, 2024 Speech rate has been shown to vary across social categories such as gender, age, and dialect, while also being conditioned by properties of speech planning. The effect of utterance length, where speech rate is faster and less variable for longer utterances ... Full text CiteQuantification of stylistic differences in human- and ASR-produced transcripts of African American English
Conference Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH · January 1, 2024 Common measures of accuracy used to assess the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, as well as human transcribers, conflate multiple sources of error. Stylistic differences, such as verbatim vs non-verbatim, can play a significant rol ... Full text CiteAdvancements of phonetics in the 21st century: Theoretical issues in sociophonetics
Journal Article Journal of Phonetics · May 1, 2023 Variation in speech has always been important to phonetic theory, but takes center stage in the growing area of sociophonetics, which places the role of the social at the heart of the theoretical and methodological enterprise. This paper provides a compreh ... Full text CiteRecent Grants
Conference: Intersections between criminal science and linguistics
ConferencePrincipal Investigator · Awarded by National Science Foundation · 2025 - 2026Evaluation of ShotSpotter Technology
Public ServicePrincipal Investigator · Awarded by City of Fayetteville · 2025 - 2025View All Grants