Research

My research interests lie in phonology and morphophonology, language contact and language endangerment. I am particularly interested in Breton and the other Celtic languages, although I have worked on a variety of languages, including Bengali and English.

Breton Morphosyntax and Morphophonology

My DPhil thesis focused on Breton and the possible effects that a gap in language transmission was having on the language, looking in particular at word order and initial consonant mutation. For my British Academy postdoctoral fellowship I continued this research, and examined lexical stress and grammatical gender in Breton loanwords, again investigating the differences between generations. I am currently publishing the results of this research, and have recently been awarded a grant from the John Fell Fund to undertake a pilot project on Intonation in Breton.

WORDS

I worked for a year as a postdoctoral research assistant on a project in the Language and Brain Lab, supported by the ERC grant WORDS. This was a wide-ranging project examining phonological perception and abstract representations. My own focus was on loanword phonology, but I was also involved in the running of psycholinguistic experiments examining Bengali and English.

Acquisition of Consonant Timing (APriL Project)

In 2013 I worked as a research assistant on another long-term collaborative project, the Oxford arm of which is led by Elinor Payne. This project is investigating the acquisition of rhythm and intonation in Catalan, Spanish and English, and I was involved in data collection, recording interviews with mothers and children aged 2, 4 and 6.