About me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics & TESOL at the University of Texas at Arlington. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Linguistics at Ohio State University in 2024, where I was advised by Cynthia Clopper and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler.

I am a laboratory phonologist and experimental sociolinguist working on cognitive representations of speech sounds, and how these representations vary with dialect exposure. I am also interested in phonological emergence. My research seeks to unite sociolinguistic questions with experimental methodologies from the psycholinguistic tradition. To this end, I have conducted both corpus-based production work and experiment-based perception work, including eye-tracking, priming, and lexical decision.

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 (PDFs of all publications are linked in my CV.)
Bissell, M. (under review). The role of dialect exposure in the processing of allophonic variation: Evidence from eye-tracking. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.

Hauser, I., Bissell, M., & Baese-Berk, M. M. (under review). Common metrics find phantom convergence in laboratory shadowing. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.

Hauser, I., Baese-Berk, M. M., & Bissell, M. (under revision). Phonological contrast and the target of phonetic imitation in English sibilants. Journal of Phonetics.

Bissell, M. (2026). Effects of exposure on perceptual evaluations of dialect-specific allophonic variation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 159(2): 1613-1629. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0042426.

Bissell, M., & Clopper, C. G. (2025). The effect of listener dialect experience on perceptual adaptation to and generalization of a novel vowel shift. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, 16(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/labphon.11588.

Bissell, M., Álvarez-Retamales, J., Champagne, M., Hatcher, J., Omar, S., & Wolfram, W. (2024). Linguistic literacy and advocacy in action: Case studies in community engagement. In A. H. Charity Hudley, M. Bucholtz, & C. Mallinson, Oxford Collection on Inclusion in Linguistics. Oxford University Press.

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.