Jennifer L. Smith

Jennifer L. Smith is a Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Linguistics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on phonology, particularly the interplay between phonological constraints, morphosyntactic categories, and experimental methods. Key areas include lexical-category effects (e.g., noun/verb phonological privilege), loanword adaptation, blend phonology, and intonation patterns in Fukuoka Japanese. She has pioneered experimental approaches using artificial-language learning and surfeit-of-the-stimulus experiments to test hypotheses about constraint interaction and phonological universals.

Smith’s work bridges formal phonology and phonetics, addressing questions like how phonetic naturalness influences phonological constraints and whether category-specific phonology reflects innate biases. Recent projects include investigating positional effects in phonology (e.g., salient positions) and the role of core-periphery structures in loanword nativization. She has collaborated extensively with researchers like Elliott Moreton and Katya Pertsova on blend phonology and experimental phonology.

Her teaching includes foundational courses like Linguistics 60: How Reading Works, emphasizing interdisciplinary connections between language, cognition, and literacy. Smith maintains key resources for the field, including a widely referenced Phonetics resources page with curated materials for teaching and research. Her office is located in Smith Building 309, and she holds regular office hours via Zoom.