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Welcome!Hi, I’m Jess, a fourth-year PhD student in Sociolinguistics at New York University. My research explores bilingual speech production and social perception, with a focus on how linguistic bias emerges and develops. My advisors are Prof. Laurel MacKenzie and Prof. Ailís Cournane. I draw on methods from sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and developmental social psychology to investigate accent bias. Using a developmental lens allows me to ask questions such as:
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Research Interests
Bilingualism
I study both speech production and perception of bilinguals. My work examines linguistic variability in multilingual speakers as well as the social perception of second language accents. I focus on how social and cognitive factors influence language use and listener judgments. During my Master’s degree at Queen Mary University of London, I investigated how cognitive load (divided attention) affects bilingual style-shifting and style control, under the supervision of Dr. Kathleen McCarthy.
Social Class
Another one of my research interests is exploring how social class shapes linguistic behavior. For my undergraduate dissertation at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Prof. Lauren Hall-Lew, I examined how socially mobile speakers (people who have experienced upward mobility) differ linguistically from speakers whose social class remained stable. This work sparked my interest in refining how researchers operationalize socioeconomic status by treating social class as a fluid, dynamic construct rather than a fixed category.
Publications
Cutler, Molly, Auromita (Disha) Mitra, Marc Barnard, Valentina Cojocaru, Jessica Göbel, and Laurel MacKenzie. (Forthcoming). Both (of) the variants show a couple (of) different patterns: Social conditioning of of-variation across multiple linguistic environments. In: U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, 31.2.
Ismael, Akil, and Jessica Göbel. (2025). The clause-medial vP phase is real: Evidence from Moselle Franconian. In: Proceedings of the Fifty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 55), Volume Two (pp. 1-11).
Göbel, Jessica, and Kathleen McCarthy. (2023). The impact of cognitive load on speech production in German-English bilinguals. In: Radek Skarnitzl & Jan Volín (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 2427–2431). Guarant International.
Hall-Lew, Lauren, Zuzana Elliott, Jessica Göbel, Claire Cowie, and Nina Markl. (2023). Variation in the Scottish BIT vowel: Comparing two corpora. In: Radek Skarnitzl & Jan Volín (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 3681–3685). Guarant International.
Göbel, Jessica. (2020). Don’t glottal stop me now: A comparative study of /t/-glottaling in Edinburgh English in the 1970s. Lifespans & Styles: Undergraduate Papers in Sociolinguistics, Volume 6, Issue 2 (pp. 32–43).