About Me

Hi! I'm Rebekah (she/they), a 5th year PhD Candidate in Linguistics at Northwestern University. I am interested in how different aspects of intonational form function to mark distinctions in pragmatic meaning.

  • To what extent is pragmatic interpretation influenced by phonetic variation within phonological categories, and across category boundaries?
  • Are relationships between intonational form and meaning one-to-one, or many-to-many (or somewhere in between)?
  • What types of semantic and pragmatic distinctions are encoded through intonation?

So far, I've approached these questions from the perspective of the listener through experiments probing perception and interpretation of prosodic variation. I specialize in the design and analysis of ordinal rating tasks.

My dissertation work investigates the intonational correlates of mirativity (linguistic marking of speaker surprise) in American English. I'm also interested in how prosody is used to encode information structure. My Qualifying Paper investigated the relationship between perceived prosodic prominence and the number of focus alternatives relevant in a particular discourse situation. I am advised by Jennifer Cole.

At Northwestern, I'm affiliated with the Prosody and Speech Dynamics Lab and the Experimental Meaning Group.

Before coming to Northwestern, I obtained a BA in Linguistics from The Ohio State University, where I worked in the Language Sciences Research Lab on gauging children's abilities to interpret intonational cues to stress and focus in their first language, and in the Prosodic Phonology Lab on adults' ability to acquire typologically rare stress patterns in an artificial language.

Research output

Peer-reviewed journal articles

  • In press. Rebekah Stanhope, Yujin Song, Sarah White, Cynthia G. Clopper, Rachael Frush Holt, Holly C. Lind-Combs, Shari Speer, & Laura Wagner. Green House or Greenhouse? Direct Comparison of Phrasal Stress Patterns Facilitates their Comprehension by Older Children. Journal of Child Language.
  • 2023. Laura Wagner, Sumurye Awani, Nikole Patson, & Rebekah Stanhope. To what extent does the general public endorse language myths? Language & Linguistics Compass.

Conference proceedings

  • 2026. Rebekah Stanhope & Jennifer Cole. Phonological Encodings of Speaker Surprise in American English Rising and Falling Nuclear Tunes. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2026.
  • 2025. Rebekah Stanhope, Thomas Sostarics, & Jennifer Cole. F0 Correlates of Perceived Speaker Surprise in American English: Accents vs. Edge Tones. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI).

CV

You can find my most recent CV here (Last updated 10/6/2025).