Jeffrey Mielke

Jeffrey Mielke is a Professor in the Department of English at North Carolina State University, directing the NCSU Phonetics Laboratory. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from The Ohio State University (2004) and has held prior academic roles at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on phonetics and phonology, particularly the articulatory basis of sound change and individual differences in speech production (e.g., autism spectrum disorders). He employs ultrasound imaging, computational modeling, and corpus analysis to study phenomena like Canadian French rhotic vowels, English /r/ allophony, and covert articulatory variation.

Key roles include Associate Editor for the Journal of Phonetics and Linguistic Typology, and leadership in the SPeech Across Dialects Of English (SPADE) project. His work bridges clinical linguistics (e.g., speech outcomes post-orthognathic surgery) and theoretical phonology. Major grants include NSF funding for Kalasha language documentation and phonetic variation studies. He advises NSSLHA at NC State and collaborates internationally on projects like autism-phonology connections and Bantu vowel harmony.

Recent research emphasizes articulatory signals from ultrasound, vowel dynamics in dialectal English, and the impact of dentofacial anomalies on speech. His lab develops tools like P-base for phonological typology and has published widely on phonetic similarity metrics and feature systems.