Research Questions:
My research focuses on answering questions in theoretical phonology using techniques from a wide variety of areas, including experimental phonetics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and semantics.
The kinds of questions I am interested in are:
-what discrete categories of sound do language users extract from a continuous acoustic signal?
-what relationships may hold between these sound categories in a given language?
-what patterns and processes apply to these categories?
-what linguistic information do these categories convey?
-how do language learners acquire these categories?
-to what extent are these categories, relationships, and processes psychologically real?
-what cognitive processes have led to these categories, relationships, and processes?
-how can these categories, relationships, and processes be modeled in an objective and predictive way?
Specific Research Projects:
Phonological Relationships: Contrast and Allophony
Evaluating the success of traditional definitions of contrast and allophony
Investigating the role of predictability in defining phonological relationships
Exploring the existence of "intermediate" phonological relationships
Information-Theoretic Phonology
Examining the interplay of constraints on communication (efficiency, robustness) with phonetics, frequency, social factors in shaping sound patterns
Applying tools from Information Theory to quantify these interactions
Collaborators: Beth Hume, Andy Wedel, Adam Ussishkin, Becca Morley, Fred Mailhot
Social Meaning of Sociophonetic Variables
Examining the ways in which semantic classifications of meaning can be applied to sociophonetic variables
Collaborators: E. Allyn Smith, Benjamin Munson
Acquisition of Sibilant Fricatives
Investigating the perception and production of sibilant fricatives cross-linguistically
Examining whether differences in order of acquisition are linked to perception or production
Collaborators: Benjamin Munson, Fangfang Li, Mary Beckman, Jan Edwards, Kiyoko Yoneyama, Yuki Sunawatari
Modern Greek Phonetics
Describing the phonetics of Modern Greek
Evaluating the usefulness of K-means clustering at finding phonological categories
Collaborator: E. Allyn Smith
Cross-Linguistic Perception of Contrast
Evaluating the perceptual salience of phonological relationships
Looking at the influence of language experience on perception
Looking at language acquisition in an exemplar-based model
Examining the role of familiarity in the perception of phonological relationships
Describing the acquisition of both non-native contrasts and non-native allophonies
Collaborators: Amanda Boomershine, Beth Hume, Keith Johnson
Canadian Raising
Investigating the current phonological status of Canadian Raising in Meaford, ON
Defining phonological rules over the lexicon
Looking at interspeaker variability
Incomplete Neutralization in Eastern Andalusian Spanish
Exploring the extent to which s-aspiration results in neutralization
Collaborator: Chip Gerfen
The Perception of Contrast and the Scottish Vowel Length Rule
Evaluating the use of native dialect cues in the perception of a non-native contrast