overview

• Yolanda Feimster Holt is Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at East Carolina University. She received her PhD from the Ohio State University. She conducts research on speech production and perception with an emphasis on African American English and Southern American English dialects. She is particularly interested in the implementation of speech modeling of socio-ethnic and regional dialects for use in text-to-speech voice production devices and mechanical listening systems (e.g. Alexa, Siri, Google and the like). Her other research interests are socio-phonetics, American English regional dialect variation broadly, sound change, bilingual speech production and child speech development. She has authored or coauthored numerous publications and presented her work at national and international meetings. She serves as a peer reviewer for scholarly journals and serves as an editorial member of the Journal of the National Black Association for Speech Language Hearing (JNBASLH). website:http://blog.ecu.edu/sites/ppsholt/