Overview

• University of Minnesota researchers Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn published the study in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America on September 23.
• The team analyzed more than 1,400 vowel tokens from Swift’s interviews (2008–2019), making ten measurements per vowel to track articulation over time.
• During Swift’s Nashville era, her speech showed Southern features such as /aɪ/ monophthongization (ride → rod-like) and /u/ fronting (two → tee-you), which largely disappeared after she returned to Pennsylvania.
• After relocating to New York, Swift’s speaking pitch was significantly lower and her vowels shifted toward northern or general American patterns, which the authors interpret as consistent with changing social roles and goals.
• The study notes key caveats, including aging as a possible factor in pitch lowering and the use of public interview audio, and reports alignment with independent singing-accent analyses cited by researcher Helen West.