Summary of Research Interests

My primary research interests are in the realms of phonetics, phonology and psycholinguistics. My current research program is focused on the variation in speech, specifically looking at variation which changes meaning versus variation which does not change meaning. My dissertation research will focus on how listeners deal with this variation in the signal, and I have worked with variation in speech corpora. I am also interested in the structures of lexicons cross-linguistically, and where variation is focused. I have also previously worked on stress and metrical phonology.

Keywords

Variation, phonetics, phonology, speech perception, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, metrical phonology

Full CV

Lexicon structure

My first qualifying paper involved two lexical decision tasks, one in English and one in Spanish, and explored the differences in how their respective lexicons are organized. My qualifying paper can be read here. Pilot results were presented at the 161st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.

I am also currently working with frequency dictionaries in English, Spanish, and French to assess cross-linguistic similarities and differences in what positions within words bear the brunt of differentiating words from each other.

Work with the Buckeye Corpus

With Molly Babel

I have begun working with automated spectral measurements from the Buckeye Corpus, in addition to simply duration, as a means of assessing reduction in spontaneous speech.

Reduction in Duration

I presented a poster at the 162nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society America dealing with reduction of segmental durations in the Buckeye Corpus.

Vowel Dynamics

I am currently working on using Smoothing Spline ANOVAs with formant tracks taken from the Buckeye Corpus. Current R code for creating vowel space plots can be downloaded here.

Imitation of Diphthongs

With Molly Babel and Graham Haber

I am working on assessing imitation of diphthongs in a shadowing task through the use of Smoothing Spline ANOVAs.

Metrical Phonology

I presented an account of Spanish stress using Harmonic Grammar at the 27th Northwest Linguistics Conference.