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Hello, I'm Nicole Holiday, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

And I'm Ben Zimmer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

And this is spectacular vernacular. A podcast will be not only explore language.

We also play with it.

This week, we're joined by Gretchen McCulloch and Maureen Gone, hosts a link thuziasm,

a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. And later on, we'll be challenging listener

with an anagram quiz. So, Nicole, a few episodes ago, you did some

on the ground reporting for us from the annual conference of the linguistic society of America

in Washington, DC. And you told us about some fascinating linguistic research that's

going on. But, you know, there was one presentation that I really wanted to hear about it. And that

was yours. Well, you know, since you asked, I guess we can talk about it.

Well, I mean, even just the title of your talk was very intriguing. Your presentation was

called Siri, you've changed acoustic properties and racialized judgments of voice assistance.

So yeah, it's about the voice assistant Siri that runs on, you know, the Apple operating

system. And I understand you were inspired to conduct this research project when a reporter

from consumer reports reached out to you last year about new voices that were added to

...