Dana Serditova is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the English Department at the University of Freiburg (Chair of Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Bernd Kortmann). She is also a Guest Researcher at the Department of English and American Studies at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.

Her PhD, titled “Salience in New Orleans English,” focused on identifying and describing distinct features of New Orleans English, such as the PIN~PEN merger, /l/-vocalization, and /aɪ/-monophthongization. Consequently, her research interests revolve around sociolinguistics, (socio)phonetics and phonology, and language variation and change. She has studied dialectal variation in North America, England, and Australia. Additionally, she is interested in bias in speech recognition and human-machine interaction.

Dana’s postdoctoral project is situated at the intersection of sociolinguistics and speech technology and is conducted in collaboration with researchers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Hochschule Düsseldorf, and Newcastle University. It aims to investigate how users adapt their speech when interacting with dialect-sensitive versus neutral automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. At HHU, she collaborates with Prof. Dr. Kevin Tang.

You are welcome to contact Dana with research project ideas in sociolinguistics, dialectology, phonetics and phonology, ASR, human-machine interaction, AI-induced language change, and related fields.