Prosody in Austronesian

Prosodic constituency in Tagalog

In current work, I look at the segmental and suprasegmental correlates of prosodic constituency in Tagalog. In the future, I hope to use these acoustic correlates to evaluate the relation between prosodic and syntactic structure in Tagalog in order to work toward a better understanding of the syntax-prosody interface.

Multimodal approach to prominence

In ongoing work with Daniel Kaufman (Queens College, CUNY & ELA) and Constantijn Kaland (University of Cologne), we have been working on a project on prosodic prominence in regional varieties of Indonesian. Indonesian has been described as a stressless language, but it's not clear whether a lack of acoustic correlates to prosodic prominence implies a lack of prosodic structure at the word level. We use evidence from gesture to speech alignment to attempt to uncover evidence for prosodic structure at the word level in regional varieties of Indonesian. 

Intonational phonology of African American English (AAE)

As a research assistant on the project Understanding Variation in African American Language (PIs Dr. Kristine Yu and Dr. Lisa Green, NSF# 2042939), I have been working on aspects of the intonational phonology of AAE. I presented a version of this joint project at New Ways of Analyzing Variation in October 2021 (link to video below, the first 10 minutes or so is an introduction to intonational phonology and prosodic transcription.) 

NWAV 49, October 2021 (with Kristine Yu, Alejna Brugos and Lisa Green):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W4tsz7Fq7M&t=555s

Phonetic implementation of tone

In work in progress with Seung Suk Lee, Cerys Hughes, Kristine Yu, we have been investigating the phonetic implementation of high tone spans in Luganda. Using Functional Principal Components Analysis (FPCA) and GAMMs, we were able to capture variation in the phonetic implementation of high tone spans that have the same surface representation, but come about through different phonological processes. However, this work also raises questions about researcher degrees of freedom and methodological choices.