My research is mainly concerned with how subcategorical phonetic details are encoded in the cognitive mechanism of speech production and perception. One of the key factors in that mechanism is the links between linguistic variant forms and social characteristics of the speakers. My dissertation, “Socially-conditioned links between words and phonetic realizations” (click here) sheds light on how socially-indexed acoustic properties of previously encountered phonetic realizations are remembered and represented at word-level storage, using a series of perception experiments. The results demonstrates that recognition of spoken words is rapidly and automatically influenced by storage information of socially meaningful covariance between phonetic variants and lexical items. This finding illuminates the role of experience-based memories of talker-indexed phonetic details of spoken words, bolstering a view that words and subphonemic details of encountered utterances are not stored separately from one another in the mind.
Results from one of the experiments from my dissertation were published in a sole-authored article in Laboratory Phonology in 2016 (click here). A paper reporting results from a second experiment (co-authored with Dr. Katie Drager) appeared in Topics in Cognitive Science (click here). Another paper presented in Interspeech 2017 can be found here.
As another line of research, my post-doctoral research at Hanyang University explored the articulatory aspect of the phonetic grammar, focusing on how low-level kinematic processes are modulated by cognitive-level functions. Using Electro-Midsagittal Articulography (EMA), our research team examined temporal adjustment and articulatory strengthening patterns of gestural movements at different levels of rhythmic junctures, testing the extent to which kinematic realizations in temporal and spatial dimensions are fine-tuned by the prosodic marking system of the language, a high-ordered structural module in the phonetics-prosody interface. A paper presented at ICPhS 2019 can be viewed here.
As a sociophonetician and a psycholinguist, I am also interested in language variation, sociophonetic variation of Korean, social meaning of variants, experience-based linguistic modeling, prosody, acoustic/articulatory phonetics, L1/L2 phonological development, and corpus-based approach.