About me

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Ohio State University, where I work with Cynthia Clopper and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler on research projects relating to laboratory phonology and language variation and change. Starting in fall 2024, I will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics & TESOL at the University of Texas at Arlington.

I am primarily interested in how phonetic, phonological, and social factors affect the production and perception of dialect-specific allophonic systems. In the realm of production, I work on how each of these types of factors contributes to the actuation and propagation of changes in these allophonic systems. In the realm of perception, I work on how listeners’ exposure to dialect-specific allophonic systems affects their phonological and lexical processing. Taken together, these lines of research aim to probe how changes in dialect-specific allophonic systems manifest and what they reveal about cognitive representations of language variation.

I have worked on the origins of pre-voiceless diphthong raising (“American raising”) in several U.S. cities using production data, including New Orleans (LA) and Columbus (OH), and of /aw/ retraction in Raleigh (NC), a city where the Southern Vowel Shift is receding.

I previously completed an M.A. in English (Linguistics) at North Carolina State University in 2019, where I worked with Robin Dodsworth, Jeff Mielke, and Walt Wolfram. I completed a B.A. in Linguistics and a B.A. in Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis in 2017, where I worked with John Baugh.

Recent refereed publications

Shport, I., Bissell, M., Berkson, K., & Carmichael, K. (2023). Regional and individual variation in acoustic targets of /ai/ and /au/ in American English. Proceedings of the International Conference of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.

Bissell, M. (2023). Placing /aw/ retraction in the retreat from the Southern Vowel Shift in Raleigh, North Carolina. Journal of English Linguistics, 55(1): 66-83. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00754242221144474.

Bissell, M., & Carmichael, K. (2022). “Dialect B” on the Mississippi: An acoustic study of /aw/ raising patterns in Greater New Orleans, Louisiana. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, 13(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/labphon.6453.

Bissell, M., & Wolfram, W. (2022). Oppositional identity and back vowel fronting in a tri-ethnic context: The case of Lumbee English. American Speech, 97(1): 51-68. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9116251.

Current projects
Pre-voiceless diphthong raising in several U.S. cities: We are investigating the phonetic origin, diachronic implementation, and phonologization of pre-voiceless /aj/ and /aw/ raising among American English speakers in Indiana, Ohio, and Louisiana. This project is an ongoing collaboration with Katie Carmichael at Virginia Tech, Kelly Berkson at Indiana University, and Irina Shport at LSU.

Dialect effects on perceptual adaptation and generalization: My second qualifying paper examines how dialect experience with particular types of vowel shifts in regional varieties of American English affects perceptual adaptation to and generalization of a novel vowel shift. This manuscript is in preparation.