Jeremy M. Needle

Contact

Office: 203 Morrill Hall, Cornell University; Ithaca, NY
Email: jeremyneedle@gmail.com
Mastodon: https://scholar.social/@JeremyNeedle

Research

I am interested in how language changes over time and varies for individuals and groups. My work deals with the mental lexicon, well-formedness, and word creation, taking into account people’s social experiences and intentions. My research on well-formedness probes how judgment arises from speakers’ experiences, how words and word-parts are represented in the mental lexicon, and how social information is integrated with these in memory. I have worked on English in the USA, UK, Canada, and in Aotearoa/New Zealand; and on Māori in Aotearoa/New Zealand. See more on my GitHub page.

Publications (Google Scholar)

• Needle, J. M. & Tagliamonte, S. A. (2024). Orderly Obsolescence: The Decline of /hw/ in Ontario. American Speech, 99(3), 300-329. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-10104915
• Todd, S., Huang, A., Needle, J., Hay, J., & King, J. (2023). Unsupervised morphological segmentation in a language with reduplication. UC Santa Barbara. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5cf017rd
• Hay, J., King, J., Todd, S., Panther, F., Mattingley, W., Oh, Y., Beckner, C., Needle, J., & Keegan, P. (2022). Ko te mōhiotanga huna o te hunga kore kōrero i te reo Māori. Te Reo, 65, 1. (pp. 42-59).
• Needle, J. M., Pierrehumbert, J. B., & Hay, J. B. (2022). Phonotactic and Morphological Effects in the Acceptability of Pseudowords. In A. Sims, A. Ussishkin, J. Parker, & S. Wray (Eds.), Morphological Diversity and Linguistic Cognition. CUP. (GitHub repo with dataset)
• Oh, Y., Todd, S., Beckner, C., Hay, J., King, J. & Needle, J. (2020). Non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders have a Māori proto-lexicon. Scientific Reports 10, 22318. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-78810-4
• Needle, J. M., & Pierrehumbert, J. B. (2018). Gendered associations of English morphology. Laboratory Phonology, 9(1), 14. http://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.134 (Authors’ PDF, GitHub repo with dataset)
• Rácz, P., Hay, J., Needle, J., King, J., & Pierrehumbert, J. B. (2016). Gradient Māori phonotactics. Te Reo, 59, 3. (Authors’ PDF)
• Goldrick, M., Keshet, J., Gustafson, E., Heller, J., & Needle, J. (2016). Automatic analysis of slips of the tongue: Insights into the cognitive architecture of speech production. Cognition, 149, 31-39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2016.01.002 (Authors’ PDF)

Presentations

• S. Tilsen & J. M. Needle. Polylect: Emergence of dialects in networks of speakers with random, constrained interactions. High Desert Linguistics Society 16 (HDLS), 2024
• J. M. Needle & S. A. Tagliamonte. Models, forests, and trees 10 years later: Practical advice for advancing empirical foundations. High Desert Linguistics Society 16 (HDLS), 2024
• B. Jankowski, J. M. Needle, & S. A. Tagliamonte. Is it a ‘camp’ or a ‘cottage’? The cultural evolution of a lexical item in Ontario. American Dialect Society 2022 (ADS) Annual Meeting.
• J. M. Needle & S. A. Tagliamonte. English vocatives in comparative perspective. New Ways of Analyzing Variation 49 (NWAV), 2021.
• J. M. Needle & S. A. Tagliamonte. Want to catch a change, love? Study vocatives! UK Language Variation and Change 13 (UKLVC), 2021.
• J. M. Needle & S. A. Tagliamonte. Honest to Pete! Honesty expressions in contemporary North American English. ICAME42, Technische Universität Dortmund, 2021.
• J. M. Needle & S. A. Tagliamonte. From buddy to dude to bro: Vocative change in Ontario English. North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics (NARNiHS) 2021 Annual Meeting.
• J. Needle, S. Todd, J. King, & J. Hay. Overt speaker knowledge of reduplication patterns in te reo Māori. LSA 2021 Annual Meeting.
• S. Todd, J. Needle, J. King, & J. Hay. Phonological influences on lexicalized compound formation in Māori. LSA 2021 Annual Meeting.

CV

• Post-Doctoral Fellow (Cornell Phonetics Lab); Cornell University (2023-2025)
• Post-Doctoral Fellow (Variationist Sociolinguistics Lab); University of Toronto (2020-2021)
• Post-Doctoral Fellow (New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour); University of Canterbury (2018-2019)
• Ph.D. (Linguistics); Northwestern University (2018)
• M.A. (English, Linguistics); North Carolina State University (2010)
• B.A. (Spanish Studies, Linguistics); Duke University (2006)