Broadly speaking, my areas of research are phonetics and laboratory phonology. My main interest lies in what bilingual speech can tell us about the processes involved in speech perception and production. This passion began developing as I struggled to learn the sounds of Spanish as an adult, and while I have branched out into additional lines of research, second language/bilingual speech remains my main interest.
Spontaneous speech & L2 learners
Most of the research concerning L2 speakers investigates carefully elicited ‘lab speech’. While this research is crucial, I am enthusiastic about adding to the burgeoning body of research regarding non-native speakers and phonetic reduction. As most research on spontaneous speech will, by definition, be observational, we need to combine carefully controlled experiments with this observational data if we want to make causal claims regarding phonetic variability. My thesis research will research various aspects of stop reduction in both native and non-native speakers of Spanish. The goal is to document and model variation in production and test how this variation impacts processing and learning new words.
Quantitative data analysis
In addition to my active research projects, I have dedicated substantial time and effort to learning about statistical modelling. I am interested in contributing to the improved use of quantitative methods in linguistics. I prefer the flexibility offered by Bayesian models, and I think they present distinct advantages for analyzing linguistic data, especially those that involve jointly modelling the behaviour of native and non-native speakers. What I believe is more important is that we understand the tools we use to analyze our data and improve transparency in reporting and evaluating models presented in publications.
Several researchers have hired me as a statistical consultant for different projects. While I am not currently looking for more consulting work (it’s time to focus on my doctoral research), I am more than happy to talk to fellow graduate students about issues regarding data analysis. At the very least, I would hope to be able to point you in the right direction.
Experimental testing of phonological theory
I am currently researching lexical stress in Catalan to test diverging theories regarding the nature of the stress system. Accounts of the stress system of Catalan are based on which patterns are present or missing from the lexicon. Research on Spanish, which has a similar stress system, has shown inconsistent results regarding whether or not all of those patterns were generalized by native speakers. This is where I believe it is crucial to test phonological theories with carefully controlled experiments, as not all patterns present in the lexicon may be generalized. Additionally, informally-acquired intuitions from small numbers of speakers are not sufficient to make general claims about language or capture the variability present across speakers of the language.