Education

• MA, German, University of Texas
• PhD, German, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Biography

Dr. O’Brien has always had a keen interest in pronunciation. Her early research focused on the perception and production of German speech sounds and prosody (especially lexical stress) among second language learners of German. In 2016 she co-authored German Phonetics and Phonology: Theory and Practice with Sarah M. B. Fagan (University of Iowa). Much of her more recent work has focused on listener reactions to accented speech, and together with her colleague Pavel Trofimovich (Concordia University) and a team of graduate students, she has been investigating how listeners evaluate accented speech in a range of settings. This work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.