Overview

• University of Minnesota researchers Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn published the peer‑reviewed findings Tuesday in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
• They analyzed interview audio from 2008 to 2019, measuring more than 1,400 vowel tokens with trajectory‑based acoustic methods to capture dialect markers.
• Southern features appeared in Swift’s Nashville interviews—monophthongization of /aɪ/ and fronting of /u/—then disappeared after her return to Pennsylvania and remained absent in her New York era.
• The study also found a significantly lower speaking pitch during the New York period, a pattern that can project authority but may also reflect typical aging from the late teens into the 30s.
• Independent linguists said the results align with other analyses of Swift’s speech and singing, while the authors note constraints including the use of casual interview data and no direct access to Swift.