Biography

I studied French and Linguistics at The Queen's College, Oxford for my undergraduate degree, and continued at Queen's for my MPhil in Linguistics. It was during my year abroad, spent in Brittany, that I first became interested in Breton, which is a Celtic language spoken in northern France. Breton is an endangered language and has seen a steep decline in the number of speakers over the past 50 years, but there are now attempts to revitalise the language. My MPhil thesis examined Breton word order. 

For my DPhil I stayed in Oxford, supervised by Professor Aditi Lahiri, but moved to Jesus College. My thesis again focused on Breton; I was particularly interested in how children in Breton-medium education use the language in comparison to a much older generation of 'traditional' native speakers. My research focused on their use of word order and of initial consonant mutation. I submitted my thesis, entitled Breton morphosyntax in two generations of speakers: evidence from word order and mutation, in July 2013. My examiners were Dr David Cram and Professor Maggie Tallerman. Following this, I worked as a research assistant in the Language and Brain Laboratory, part of the Faculty of Linguistics at Oxford, and began writing up parts of my thesis as research articles.

I then worked for a year as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Language and Brain Laboratory, as part of the ERC-funded project WORDS: Asymmetry, change and processing in phonological mental representation. My own work focused on research into loanword phonology, and I was also involved in the day-to-day running of the lab, assisting with psycholinguistic experiments (EEG and behavioural) to investigate phonological representations in the mental lexicon.

In 2015 I was awarded a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship, beginning in January 2016, which allowed me to return to Breton. My project was entitled Metrical structure, gender and mutation: two generations of Breton speakers under influence from French. I was interested in the way in which French loanwords are adapted to Breton morphophonology, and looked in particular at grammatical gender and metrical stress. The full abstract for my project can be found on the British Academy's website (here), and I am beginning to publish the findings from this research. 

Since January 2019 I have been a Departmental Lecturer in Phonetics and Phonology at the University of Oxford. I teach both undergraduate and graduate students for Phonology, Phonetics, Psycholinguistics and Historical Linguistics, and also supervise graduate projects and theses which fall within my areas of interest. I am continuing my research into morphophonology, focusing mainly on Breton, but also incorporating more general work on loanwords, and I have recently been awarded a grant from the University's John Fell Fund to do a pilot project on Intonation in Breton.