Research

My current and recent research interests include:

• Speech synthesis. I have worked on speech synthesis solutions for people with speaking impairments. I am also interested in how speech synthesis might be used in language promotion and revitalization. New methods that require less extensive training data promise to be useful in both of these areas.

• Voice quality. I have come to this topic through the use of spectral tilt (a family of acoustic measures related to overall spectrum shape). How can we quantitatively measure voice quality, and how does voice quality relate to prosodic and other patterns in language? I am currently involved in a project to quantify "creaky voice" and apply it as a measurement to some prosodic data.

• Educational technology. Online teaching is a convenient way to deliver university-level content. How can we harness the multitude of web-based tools and resources to most effectively teach students the knowledge and skills required in modern linguistic inquiry?

• Whispered speech. I have investigated the perception and production of English "voicing" contrasts in whispered speech. Listeners are remarkably good at hearing the difference, even when phonetic voicing and duration cues are removed. Future work will investigate what acoustic cues listeners are using to distinguish these sounds.

• Endoscopic measurement. Videos of laryngeal behaviour, obtained using nasal endoscopes, are rich in information, but it is time-consuming and difficult to derive meaningful numerical measurements from such videos. I am interested in finding ways to measure endoscopic video data so that we can efficiently extract linguistically-meaningful, statistically tractable data from them.

• I am currently part of both the Alberta Phonetics Laboratory (APhL) and the Alberta Language Technology Lab (ALTlab) at the University of Alberta's excellent Linguistics Department.