Abby Walker

Abby Walker is an associate professor of linguistics in the English Department at Virginia Tech, and director of The Speech Lab at Virginia Tech.

Her work investigates the ways in which individuals change their speech in the moment (depending on who they are talking to or what they are talking about) and over time (because of changes in their community, or because they change communities); the mechanisms behind cross-dialectal speech perception; and the social evaluation of language. Her work pulls from sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and phonetics, and although her work primarily looks at different dialects of English, she has recent collaborative projects on Korean and Spanish.