“You know how you can get a mental picture of someone on the phone without seeing them at all? I study how people do that.” Nicole Holliday, acting associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, studies the social information carried in speech: the subtle cues of region, age, race and gender that listeners decode automatically, often without knowing they're doing it. “My linguistic research has always come back to one question: ‘When we hear speech, what properties do we attune to that enable us to make social judgments about each other?’. It has major implications for how we think about society, identity and inequality.” She emphasizes the importance of basic research, including linguistics, and how it helps us tackle big problems—ultimately building structures and systems that make the world a better place for us all. “We now live in a world where humans are speaking and interacting not only with other humans, but also with technological systems designed to give us the illus...