She received her PhD in 2003 in Linguistics, followed by a Post-doctoral Research Fellowship in Psychology. Her research investigates the meaningful contribution of phonetic variation to the processes and representations involved in spoken language understanding. Specifically, she focuses on how listeners integrate cues to sounds and words alone with cues to talker characteristics to arrive at the social meaning of spoken words. In her work, she has recently found that listeners attend differently to speech depending on the perceived characteristics of a talker. As a Clayman Fellow, Professor Sumner will further investigate these findings to better understand the social parameters that predict this effect.