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Areas of interest
Language variation and social meaning
Language ideologies
Language attitudes
Dialectology
Speech perception
Intepretation of grammatical gender
Linguistic Coherence
I am interested in how linguistic features combine and create new meanings, particularly when they belong to different registers, varieties or serve to index different styles. In my PhD thesis, I look at a variety of French found at a borderland between two broad linguistic areas (Langue d'Oc and Langue d'Oïl). The project investigates how Southern and supralocal features combine in Bordeaux French, and what might constitute 'coherence' in this variety (i.e., can we predict which features co-occur and covary, when and why). For example, there are hierarchical relations (implicational scales, cf. figure 1) in Bordeaux French between the Southern French features, where the use of southern nasal vowel variants correlate with the retention of word-final schwas and Loi de Position. These patterns occur in the speech of almost all the speakers recorded. However, there does not seem to be any (internal) constraint in how phonetic features co-occur within small temporal windows. Namely, southern and standard phonetic features seem to be able to co-occur freely.
Figure 1. Overall frequencies of Southern features in interview
I am also interested in the effect of combination of features on speech perception, particularly when features initially belong to different (and even ideologically contradictory) lects. For my thesis, I designed an experiment to measure the effect of combination of southern nasal vowels and word-internal schwa retention on the perception of the regional accentedness and formality. While in production, phonetic features can freely co-occur, the results of the experiment show that different types of co-occurrence trigger different perceptions of the speech signal. For example, there is evidence for an incremental effect of southern features on perception of accentedness (i.e., two southern features within a word trigger a stronger perception of 'southerness' than one southern feature) but some kind of blocking effect on formality (i.e., the presence of a southern nasal vowel is likely to block the perception of schwa retention as cueing formality in specific contexts). A short version of the experiment is available in the Penn Working Papers in Linguistics Volume 30(2).
Figure 2. Responses on Accent Scale
Male bias and Androcentrism
Outside of my PhD work, I am also interested in how masculine grammatical gender may trigger particular bias in interpretation in languages with a grammatical gender system, and generally how our bias and sexist beliefs impact how we describe our world.
In collaboration with Farida Soliman (QMUL) and Chloé Vincent (Universiteit Gent), we are currently working on a set of experiments which elicit different strategies to refer to occupations, when grammatical gender is fully neutralised. Preliminary results were presented at the Taal & Tongval colloquium (November 2024). The poster can be found here and the osf registration here.
I have previously published with Dr. Heather Burnett on gender bias in constructed examples of French syntax articles and on the perception of grammatical gender in French and the effect of neutralisation of grammatical gender.
Figure 3. Posteriors distributions of the coefficient
(grammatical gender elicitation task)
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