Of the numerous ways speech can be studied, my research focuses on the intersection between the physical realization and the cognitive aspects of language, especially in the area of prosody. I find prosody particularly interesting, since it is an essential part of our communicative system at many different levels, encoding both linguistic information (e.g., word prominence, tonal distinctions, syntactic structure, and logical form) and non-linguistic information (e.g., pragmatic, emotional, and social information). Thus, prosody is one of the richest areas of a language, and its study can inform our understanding and models of linguistic competence and performance with a more nuanced integration of communicative, general cognitive, and social elements. Within the domain of prosody, the two main areas I focus on are prosodic development and prosodic typology, aiming to understand different aspects of prosodic systems across languages; both how they are structured and processed, and how they develop in children. The approach I take in both areas is what can be considered “laboratory phonology” – seeking to address fundamental phonological challenges on the basis of experimental research, in particular acoustic data.
Acquisition of prosody
I am particularly interested in the less studied acquisition of complex structures, beyond the word level, that is not fully completed until the early teenage years. Specifically, I have investigated the acquisition of the acoustic properties of phrasal and compound prosody in English and Greek, as well as clitic constructions in Greek. My research shows that despite sensitivity to prosody observed in young infants, the process of refinement of the properties of adult prosody persists for many years, supporting a connection between the more abstract phonological structure and representation of prosodic patterns and their developmental trajectory. In continuation of this line of work, with Dr. Curtin, we are currently investigating children's perception of compound and phrasal prosody in English with an eye-tracking methodology and its connection with children's production properties of these structures.
Bootstrapping in language acquisition
One of the most fundamental questions in language acquisition research is how babies, who are born with no knowledge of their language, are able to learn their language in a relatively short time by just listening to sequences of sounds from adults. There are many bootstrapping hypotheses proposed in the literature (prosodic, syntactic, semantic, etc.) and all have the underlying assumption that there are cues in adult language babies can use for language learning. My interest in bootstrapping is two-fold: a) what are the cues in the adult language and b) which of those cues babies use.
With respect to the adult language cues, with Dr. Vogel, we have studied the cues of phrasal prosody that have been proposed to bootstrap the acquisition of word order. Our study shows that there are no systematic differences in phrasal prosody between languages with different word orders that babies could use to learn the word order of their language.
With respect to the cues babies use, with Dr. Curtin and Dr. Pexman, we are studying the use of sound symbolic cues in vocabulary development. Specifically, we study the bouba-kiki effect during their first year of life (at 4, 8, and 12 months) to test whether these effects are a biologically endowed aspect of perception or it emerges with experience (e.g., language exposure).
The input in language acquisition
Children matching adult behavior is only one way of viewing language acquisition. Language change, however, can be introduced by children modifying adult grammars so, we must consider how modifications may take place. With Dr. Vogel, we investigate how language acquisition interacts with language change, specifically about the boundary phenomena in American English that have changed in the last 30-40 years. Creaky phonation is a recent intonational pattern in English that started in young female speakers of the language. It is used instead of or in addition to falling pitch and rising pitch (uptalk). While the parents of most English-speaking children did not consistently use creaky phonation, the youngest children who were still mostly exposed to such speakers also did not use it. Older children, however, especially girls, were beginning to include it in their speech production. As a result, we question the simple linear model of language acquisition which assumes that children linearly progress towards the adult-model language. Following other work in syntax, we suggest that we also need to consider how language changes as children acquire it and we need to integrate that change into a more complex language acquisition model. Since prosody is especially relevant in conveying various types of sociolinguistic information, this also opens the discussion of acquisition to the consideration of additional aspects of development, and to the possibility of an even longer developmental trajectory.
Prosodic typology
I have been engaged over the past five year in a large cross-linguistic study, in collaboration with Dr. Vogel (Stress Typologies Lab), to investigate the manifestation of prominence (stress and focus) in diverse languages (among others: Greek, French, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Korean, Mandarin). This involves the collection and analysis of large corpora of comparable data in the various languages, since previous accounts of these phenomena frequently involve confounds between the two, and use such divergent methodologies that meaningful comparisons and generalizations cannot be made. As comparable data is collected on an increasing number of languages, we are able to address a range of typological (e.g., the typology of rhythm, the manifestation of focus in different word-prosodic systems), phonological (e.g., . the functional load of different prominence cues as a result of a language's phonological system; the status of vowel length distinctions in Hungarian; the foot structure and stress assignment in Arabic; the status of schwa in French), and phonetic issues (e.g., measuring pitch in creaky phonation speech, comparison of various phonetic tools in measuring pitch and voice quality).
Expanding my work on prosody, with Dr. Flynn, we are working on documenting and analyzing the prosodic system of Plains Cree and Michif, two Indigenous languages spoken in Canada. To date, the focus has been on syntax and some segmental issues, but work on prosody (word or sentence) is quite minimal or absent altogether. Working on Indigenous languages in Canada, have also introduced to me the ethical challenges of working with aboriginal people who have been oppressed because of their identity and language. I am also learning more about working with the community in developing materials that would be beneficial for them, for example, in language teaching, language preservation and revitalization.
The phonetics of fricatives
Fricatives are particularly interesting since they all exhibit high frequency noise and the phonetic properties of fricatives cannot distinguish them very well. In this study, with Dr. Spinu and Dr. Lilley, we investigate the phonetic characteristic of a system rich in fricative consonants, Greek, with two voicing values and five places of articulation, Greek is a system with ten fricative sounds. Of particular interest is the distinction between the two front fricatives (labiodental vs interdental), which is challenging not only for statistical discrimination, but even human perception.
Other work: The development of mathematical and spatial abilities
With Dr. Golinkoff, in the Infant Language Project Lab, I studied spatial abilities in children as young as 3 in order to examine how their abilities to recognize geometric shapes predict their later mathematical achievements and may be connected to other cognitive abilities such as language, executive function, and memory. We also investigated how language differences affect the success of children in school by comparing English and Greek speaking children’s spatial and mathematical abilities. I also worked at the Language and Development Lab with Dr. Barner to examine the effect of abacus training on children's mathematical development as well as the effect of language in number acquisition by testing bilingual children.