Marianna Di Paolo is currently Associate Professor at the University of Utah where she has served as Director of the Linguistics Program (1993-1999) and then as the first Chair of the Department of Linguistics (1999-2005). Her primary research interest has been variation and change in the English of the Intermountain West with a concentration on on-going phonetic and phonological changes in the vowels of this region. Malcah Yaeger-Dror is currently a research scientist at the University of Arizona. Her primary research interests include the analysis of disagreement strategies keynoting prosodic variation and the analysis of the cognitive underpinnings which can reveal whether a given 'change' produced by a speaker is from 'above' or 'below' the speaker's 'level of awareness'.
"""This exquisite student's guide takes the beginner from the first steps in fieldwork and acoustics to the more advanced topics of sociophonetics.a It is written by leading scholars known for their student-friendly stance at workshops at international conferences.a I will be using it for years to comeaas a set text for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, and in fine-tuning my own work in this fast-growing research area."" - Rajend Mesthrie, University of Cape Town, South Africa.aa ""The book is a rich source of information on methodologies of sociophonetic analysis, with information ranging from the basics of data collection to the most advanced computational techniques. The editors have done a remarkable job of putting together a variety of papers on phonetic, acoustic, and statistical analyses and linking them effectively to social factors such as speaker, age, purpose (i.e. normal speech or formal interviews), role, and context."" -- Seetha Jayaraman, Dhofar University, LINGUIST List"