Cynthia Clopper, professor of linguistics, was named chair of the Department of Linguistics, effective July 1, 2019 (pending approval by the Board of Trustees). Clopper has served as interim chair since August 2018. 

Clopper received her BA from Duke University and MA and PhD from Indiana University. She spent one year as a postdoctoral researcher at Indiana and one year as a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University before becoming a faculty member at Ohio State in 2006. 

Her current research examines variation in spoken language processing; how children perceive and interpret speech to make judgments about social categories; and how perception of regional dialect variation changes over the lifespan. She is also co-editor of the journal Language and Speech and has served on the editorial boards for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America and the Journal of Phonetics