Georgia Zellou

Georgia Zellou is an American linguistics professor at the University of California-Davis. Her research focuses on topics in phonetics and laboratory phonology.

Education and research
Zellou received her PhD in linguistics from the University of Colorado-Boulder in 2012, with a dissertation entitled "Similarity and Enhancement: Nasality from Moroccan Arabic Pharyngeals and Nasals." She joined UC-Davis in 2014, and she is currently a co-director of the UC-Davis phonetics lab. She has conducted research on the phonetics of nasalization in numerous languages, and more recently has investigated the phonetics of human-AI interactions.

Honors and awards
In May 2016, Georgia Zellou was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies and the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich, upon an invitation from PD Dr. Marianne Pouplier and Prof. Dr. Jonathan Harrington in the context of the CAS Research Focus project, "Speech and Language Processing: How Words Emerge and Dissolve."

In 2019, she received the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Mentoring and she was named a UC-Davis Dean's Fellow in 2020.

In 2020, she was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. She was a 2017-18 Hellman Foundation Fellow.

During the 2021–2022 academic year, she conducted research as a Fulbright scholar in France.

Selected publications

 * Cohn, Michelle, Bruno Ferenc Segedin & Georgia Zellou. 2022. Acoustic-phonetic properties of Siri- and human-directed speech. Journal of Phonetics 90, 101123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2021.101123
 * Zellou, Georgia. 2017. Individual differences in the production of nasal coarticulation and perceptual compensation. Journal of Phonetics 61, 13–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2016.12.002
 * Zellou, Georgia & Delphine Dahan. 2019. Listeners maintain phonological uncertainty over time and across words: The case of vowel nasality in English. Journal of Phonetics 76, 100910. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2019.06.001
 * Zellou, Georgia & Meredith Tamminga. 2014. Nasal coarticulation changes over time in Philadelphia English. Journal of Phonetics 47, 18–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2014.09.002