Profile

My research program incorporates both low-level phonetic details and high-level perceptual processes to get out how phonological systems are formed. Thus, my research methodology takes two different, but connected approaches: (1) how does speech production and phonetic variation conditions phonological processes? and (2) how does speech perception govern phonological systems?

To answer the first question, I most frequently make use of acoustic and ultrasound data to examine phonetic variation and different factors, such as positional effects, that influence phonological processes. A good example of this, is a current project on lateral vocalization in Brazilian Portuguese I'm working on with Dr. Marzena Żygis. Lateral vocalization most commonly takes places in the coda position. Phonetically, in the coda position, additional tongue body retraction takes place to correctly phase the vocalic tongue body gestures together. The result is reduced tongue tip contact at the alveolar ridge, which, over time can cause the loss of the tongue tip gesture completely.

To answer the second question, I make use of both acoustic and perceptual data. I use this data to examine how human perception influences phonological inventories and processes. For example, I am currently looking the cross-linguistic perception of liquids with Dr. Jessamyn Schertz and Dr. M. Irfana. An identification task was performed for Hindi, English, Malayalam, and Mandarin listeners. Each participant heard a stimuli set created by manipulating F2 and F3 of an intervocalic rhotic. The cross-linguistic data shows a tremendous tendency to hear rhotics and laterals in the same formant space and sugests a cross-linguistic similarity in the acoustic-perceptual space for liquids as a whole. This data might suggest why rhotics and laterals, although very different, often pattern together.

I also have general interests in Slavic languages, endangered languages, computational modelling of the vocal tract, and neurolinguistics.