Hello! I’m Jess and I’m a second year PhD student at NYU. I am a Sociolinguist who is interested in bilingualism, especially in the German-English context. More about my research interests:
Bilingualism
My research examines linguistic variation among multilingual speakers using sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic methods. I am interested the social and cognitive factors that affect language variability. During my Master’s degree at Queen Mary University of London, I investigated how cognitive load (or divided attention) affects bilingual style shifting and style control, under the supervision of Dr Kathleen McCarthy.
I firmly believe that bilingualism should be celebrated and that speaking multiple languages a gift. One of the fundamental endeavors of my research is to highlight the inherent value of being bilingual, and deconstructing monolingual language ideologies by studying the patterning of linguistic variation among bilinguals.
Social class
Another one of my interests lies in analysing social class effects on linguistic variation. My undergraduate dissertation at the University of Edinburgh examines how socially mobile speakers (individuals who had been upwardly socially mobile in their life) pattern differently from speakers whose social class had remained static. I was supervised by Prof Lauren Hall-Lew. This research made me interested in improving operationalizations of socioeconomic status by treating social class as potentially fluid.
Publications
Göbel Jessica, and McCarthy Kathleen. 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, Elliott Zuzana, Göbel Jessica, Cowie Claire, and Markl Nina. 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).