About Me

I am a PhD Candidate in Linguistics at Northwestern University, where I'm affiliated with the Prosody and Speech Dynamics Lab and the Experimental Meaning Group.

As a laboratory phonologist, I am interested in how languages organize systems of sound-meaning correspondences. My current work focuses on the intonation system of American English, using experimental approaches to investigate how variation in intonational form signals 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.

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, e12486. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12486 (Open access)

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. https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2026-66 (Open access)
  • 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). https://doi.org/10.21437/TAI.2025-25 (Open access)

Recent presentations

(2024 - present; see CV for earlier presentations)
  • 2026 (Upcoming). Rebekah Stanhope. Individual differences in interpreting dynamic pitch: gradient vs. quantal. Invited talk at ASA Special Session on Pitch Prosody in Dynamical Analysis.
  • 2026. Rebekah Stanhope & Jennifer Cole. Continuous covariation of intonational form and pragmatic meaning. Talk at LabPhon 20.
  • 2026. Rebekah Stanhope & Jennifer Cole. Phonological Encodings of Speaker Surprise in American English Rising and Falling Nuclear Tunes. Poster at Speech Prosody 2026.
  • 2025. Rebekah Stanhope, Thomas Sostarics, & Jennifer Cole. F0 Correlates of Perceived Speaker Surprise in American English: Accents vs. Edge Tones. Talk at TAI 2025.
  • 2024. Rebekah Stanhope & Jennifer Cole. Are focus-driven effects on prominence perception sensitive to alternative set cardinality? Talk at MidPhon 29.
  • 2024. Jennifer Cole, Kate Sandberg, Thomas Sostarics, Rebekah Stanhope & Eszter Ronai. Intonation and its meaning: Beyond essential differences. Poster at CROSSIN: Intonation at the crossroads.
  • 2024. Laura Wagner, Yujin Song, Shari Speer, Sarah White, & Rebekah Stanhope. The Prosody of Compound Nouns: Direct Comparison of Tunes Helps Children (and Adults). Talk at 16th International Congress for the Study of Child Language.
  • 2024. Yujin Song, Laura Wagner, Rachael Frush Holt, Rebekah Stanhope, & Shari Speer. The acquisition of prosodic prominence to disambiguate compounds and phrases. Poster at LabPhon 19.

CV

You can find my most recent CV here (Last updated 8/4/2026).

Contact Me

rstanhope [at] u [dot] northwestern [dot] edu