Research Interests
My research focuses on language change and variation, especially sound change, drawing on an interdisciplinary mix of theory and methodology from historical and socio-linguistics, phonetics, phonology, and psycholinguistics.
My dissertation explores the interaction of the theoretical underpinnings of sound change with modern experimental techniques in speech perception and production, by recreating the effects of sound change in a laboratory setting, in order to measure these effects on talkers and listeners so that we may fill in the gaps in the existing theories. I am also interested in usage-based, probabilistic models of synchronic phonology and their implications for sound change.
Another main interest is in the historical development and diachronic and synchronic variation in the dental fricatives. The dental fricatives are unique in that they are not differentiated from each other orthographically. A comparison of variation in the dental fricatives with that of related sounds gives us an opportunity to look at the role of orthography in variation and sound change.
I am also co-authoring (with Mary Beckman and Anouschka Foltz) a textbook for Ling 286 - Analyzing the sounds of languages, which is a course that uses phonetics to guide students through data analysis and statistics. We believe that numeracy is as important as literacy, and that students should have access to compelling real life data. Data do not appear ex nihilo and it is, at best, a waste of time (though we believe these practices may actually contribute to the bad statistics prevalent today) to teach data analysis as if the data don't matter. This is why we provide real data from real language examples, that are interesting and accessible, especially to students of linguistics, but also to anyone who finds language interesting, including general humanities students. Course materials may be found here.
