I am currently working with Dr. Nicole Holliday (UC Berkeley) and Dr. Sabriya Fisher (Wellesley College) on their Spencer Foundation funded project focused on examining the prosodic and morphosyntactic cues that are salient in disciplinary experiences for AAE speakers in Boston and Philadelphia.
My dissertation focused on the role of prosody in narrative structure and identity discourses. I am continuing this work by investigating prosodic variation in several ways: (1) what type of intonational variation exists in communities of US Spanish, Chicano English, and other varieties associated with the Latinx community, (2) what type of prosodic cues do listeners rely on to make social judgements, and (3) what are the exact discourse functions of intonation in these varieties?
I am currently involved in several projects looking at discourses of resistance against the linguistic commodification and mocking of Spanish, fluid constructions of Latinidad, and discourses of cultural authenticity in Latinx communities. Most of these projects carry an educational focus, with a broad goal to inform approaches and practices in classrooms and other sites where ideas about race and language interract with consequential effects.
These projects look at the emergence of voice-AI technology and the constant quest to recreate human-like speech. Within this context, I ask: where do bilingual and fluid linguistic practices exist? How are underrepresented varieties treated and considered within voice-AI construction? What does it mean for voice-AI to be inclusive of these repertoires? One current project I am looking at to partly uncover this is the perception of code-switching in voice-AI to assess the current state of tools like Alexa and Siri in reproducing linguistic phenomena that represent a common part of speakers' real practices.
Within studies of discrimination and critical analysis of language and power, I am interested in better understanding how listeners use features of grammar, particularly at the sound level, to categorize speakers into culturally-contextual personae (e.g., native vs non-native speaker). In one study, I found that listeners rely on certain Persian morphosyntactic and lexical features (e.g., negative concord) to assess a speaker as both belonging to and not belonging to native speaker categories. I am currently extending this work to look at similar phenomena in US Latinx communities. This may reveal further insight about the salience of prosody in (re)producing consequential social categories and the link between discrimination and sound level variation.