6/28/12: This fall I am headed to Pittsburgh for a year as a Mellon fellow at CMU. As of next fall, I will be an assistant professor at National University of Singapore.

Summary

My primary research area is sociolinguistics, which refers to the study of language and society. Most of my recent projects address questions of how children learn what different ways of speaking mean, how language in the media expresses social meaning, and which aspects of language might be socially meaningful. My research tends to involve some variety of Chinese or English, though I also happily work on Japanese and Irish.

Projects

Click on a project to learn more.

Social and stylistic variation in Mandarin-English dual-language immersion environments

Affective Sentence-Final Particles on Taiwanese Mandarin television

	Ironic indexicality and abbreviation slang ("Abbrevs")
	The role of voice quality in performing stylized femininities in Japanese (the "sweet voice" project)
	Predicting NP form in Vernacular Written Cantonese
	Phonological Variation in Shanghai Mandarin
	Other Projects

Hall-Lew, Lauren & Rebecca L. Starr. 2010. Beyond the 2nd Generation: English Use among Chinese Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area. English Today 26(3). 12-19. pdf

Hall-Lew, Lauren, Elizabeth Coppock, & Rebecca L. Starr. 2010. Indexing Political Persuasion: Variation in the Iraq Vowels. American Speech 85(1). 91-102. pdf

Starr, Rebecca L. 2009. Teaching the Standard Without Speaking the Standard: Variation among Mandarin-Speaking Teachers in a Dual-Immersion School. Selected Papers from NWAV 37. University of Pennsylvania: Working Papers in Linguistics 15(2). 121-132. pdf

Zheng, Yanli, Richard Sproat, Liang Gu, Izhak Shafran, Haolang Zhou, Yi Su, Daniel Jurafsky, Rebecca Starr and Su-Youn Yoon. 2005. Accent Detection and Speech Recognition for Shanghai-Accented Mandarin. In Proceedings of EUROSPEECH-05, Lisbon, Portugal. pdf

Curriculum vitae (12/01/11)