Research Program
My research touches on the following areas:
- Speech & sexuality:
- How might sexual orientation function as a factor in sociophonetic analysis, and how might it interact with gender & gender normativity?
- My second qualifying paper starts by verifying the role of the phonetic variant most typically said to index sexual orientation, at least in gay men (/s/ frontedness; see Fuchs & Toda 2010, Hazenberg 2012, Zimman 2013, 2017, Calder, 2019), and exploring to what extent it is used by individuals spanning a fuller range of sexual orientations and gender identities than has previously been considered (especially centering bi+ and non-binary people, cf. Munson et al., 2006, Willis 2021), in addition to other co-existing social identities. I then incorporate other potential loci for indexation, including other sibilants (/ʃ z/), f0, and vowel space size, with the goal of exploring what the "principal components" are in the phonetics of sexuality, as distinct (or not) from gender.
- How might sexual orientation function as a factor in sociophonetic analysis, and how might it interact with gender & gender normativity?
- The phonetics-phonology interface:
- How abstract and discrete is the phonetics-phonology interface? To what extent, and at what level of abstraction, do articulatory, social, and cognitive factors respectively constrain such a model?
- My WCCFL41 proceedings paper probes these questions in the context of Spanish /sC/ sequences, using Q-theory (Shih & Inkelas 2013) and Cue-based features (Pfiffner 2021).
- How abstract and discrete is the phonetics-phonology interface? To what extent, and at what level of abstraction, do articulatory, social, and cognitive factors respectively constrain such a model?
- Sound change:
- How does the way speech communities are positioned, both geographically and ideologically, affect how speech sounds pattern synchronically and over time, especially in varieties of a shared language?
- What can synchronic sociophonetic data reveal about diachronic change, and vice versa?
- See publications list below for examples of work in this area.
- See also my ICPhS 20 proceedings paper with Nicholas Henrisken, which is a comparative study of three Spanish dialects representing distinct stages in the sound change towards post-aspiration in /sC/ sequences.
- Language documentation
- I work with collaborator Sansan Claude Hien to contribute to the documentation and description of the Lobi language (Gur, West Africa). Primarily this work has focused on the phoneme inventory and it's phonetic variation, especially the vowel space and the relationship between implosives, labial-velars, and glottalized sonorants (i.e., /l' j' w'/).
Academic Publications:
September 2023. Perceptions of speaker origin and social characteristics of three varieties of Iberian Spanish. With Nicholas Henriksen, Micha Fischer, Lorenzo Garcia-Amaya, Zoe Phillips, Natalie Dakki, Ellie Maly, Sarah Khansa, Tommy Wiaduck, Jessica Czapla, Vidhya Premkumar, and Stepan Topouzian. Journal of Linguistic Geography.
August 2023. Cross-dialectal comparison of /st/ clusters in Spanish: Implications for sound change. With Nicholas Henriksen. Proceedings of the 20th ICPhS .
April 2023. Sound Change in Western Andalusian Spanish: An Acoustic Analysis of Phonemic Voiceless Stops. With Nicholas Henriksen and Micha Fischer. Journal of Phonetics.
December 2022. Sociophonetic Investigation of the Spanish Alveolar Trill /r/ in Two Canonical-Trill Varieties. With Nicholas Henriksen and Shayna Greenley. Language and Speech.
August 2023. Cross-dialectal comparison of /st/ clusters in Spanish: Implications for sound change. With Nicholas Henriksen. Proceedings of the 20th ICPhS .
April 2023. Sound Change in Western Andalusian Spanish: An Acoustic Analysis of Phonemic Voiceless Stops. With Nicholas Henriksen and Micha Fischer. Journal of Phonetics.
December 2022. Sociophonetic Investigation of the Spanish Alveolar Trill /r/ in Two Canonical-Trill Varieties. With Nicholas Henriksen and Shayna Greenley. Language and Speech.
Public Scholarship:
2020. Socially Distant Yet Intellectually Close: One class’ guide to reimagining pedagogy in the age of COVID-19. With Zoe Phillips and Ellie Maly. Inside Higher Ed. [link]
Presentations:
May 2024. Post-nasal devoicing in Limba-Tonko. [Paper presentation]. With Daniel Ibrahim Kamara. ACAL55.
August 2023. Cross-dialectal comparison of /st/ clusters in Spanish: Implications for sound change. [Paper presentation]. ICPhS20.
June 2023. Quantifying the Lobi vowel space. [Paper presentation]. ACAL54.
May 2023. A Q- and Exemplar-Theoretic approach to cross-dialect Spanish <st> production. [Paper presentation]. WCCFL41.
April 2023. A Q- and Exemplar-Theoretic approach to cross-dialect Spanish <st> production. [Paper presentation]. CLS59. (Accepted, declined to present)
March 2023. A Q-theoretic approach to cross-dialect Spanish <st> production. Phorum (UCB Phonetics, Phonology, and Psycholinguistics forum) invited talk.
August 2021. Perceptions of speaker origin and social attributes of three varieties of Iberian Spanish. Presentation for undergraduate Spanish Linguistics course at U-M.
June 2021. Sound Change in Western Andalusian Spanish: Analysis of Phonemic Voiceless Stops. With Nicholas Henriksen. [Paper presentation]. PaPE 2021.
2021. Sound Change in Western Andalusian Spanish: An Acoustic Analysis of Phonemic Voiceless Stops. Presentation for undergraduate Spanish Linguistics course at U-M.
2021. Phonemic Voiceless Stops in Western Andalusian Spanish: The confluence of post-aspiration and intervocalic voicing. With Nicholas Henriksen. [Paper presentation]. MidPhon25. [pdf]
2020. Sound Change in Western Andalusian Spanish: An Acoustic Analysis of Phonemic Voiceless Stops. Undergraduate honors thesis defense.
August 2023. Cross-dialectal comparison of /st/ clusters in Spanish: Implications for sound change. [Paper presentation]. ICPhS20.
June 2023. Quantifying the Lobi vowel space. [Paper presentation]. ACAL54.
May 2023. A Q- and Exemplar-Theoretic approach to cross-dialect Spanish <st> production. [Paper presentation]. WCCFL41.
April 2023. A Q- and Exemplar-Theoretic approach to cross-dialect Spanish <st> production. [Paper presentation]. CLS59. (Accepted, declined to present)
March 2023. A Q-theoretic approach to cross-dialect Spanish <st> production. Phorum (UCB Phonetics, Phonology, and Psycholinguistics forum) invited talk.
August 2021. Perceptions of speaker origin and social attributes of three varieties of Iberian Spanish. Presentation for undergraduate Spanish Linguistics course at U-M.
June 2021. Sound Change in Western Andalusian Spanish: Analysis of Phonemic Voiceless Stops. With Nicholas Henriksen. [Paper presentation]. PaPE 2021.
2021. Sound Change in Western Andalusian Spanish: An Acoustic Analysis of Phonemic Voiceless Stops. Presentation for undergraduate Spanish Linguistics course at U-M.
2021. Phonemic Voiceless Stops in Western Andalusian Spanish: The confluence of post-aspiration and intervocalic voicing. With Nicholas Henriksen. [Paper presentation]. MidPhon25. [pdf]
2020. Sound Change in Western Andalusian Spanish: An Acoustic Analysis of Phonemic Voiceless Stops. Undergraduate honors thesis defense.
Media:
2020. Episode 28: Zoe, Amber and Ellie. With Zoe Phillips and Ellie Maly. My Education. [link to part 1] [link to part 2]