Zion Ariana Mengesha

Zion Mengesha is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics. Through her work with the Voices of California project at Stanford, she has conducted sociolinguistic fieldwork throughout the Central Valley, examining English dialectology with particular attention paid to minority ethnic communities. Her research also explores the ways that linguistic styles are tied to stereotypes both in speech perception and memory. To that end, she has studied how talker voice and social stereotypes influence the immediate recall and long-term recognition memory of spoken words. In addition, she has studied language attitudes toward African American Vernacular English in Bay Area public high schools. Her research interests include sociophonetics, speech perception, and psycholinguistics.