Research

My research focuses mainly on sociolinguistics and phonetics (sociophonetics), particularly the use of acoustic phonetics to explore language change. My research also overlaps heavily with other areas, particularly historical linguistics, language revitalization, and language documentation. I am especially interested in the dynamics of language maintenance and attrition in minority language communities. I strive for my work to benefit the people whose languages I study, and explore new research methodologies with this goal in mind. To that end, much of my work is about building connections between researchers, students, and communities.

You can access PDFs of my papers and presentations on my ResearchGate profile.

Armenian Language in the Bay Area Project (ALBA)

My dissertation research explores phonetic variation and change, and language maintenance, among heritage speakers of Armenian in the San Francisco Bay Area. As part of this program, I have developed a research assistant program for Armenian-speaking undergraduate students at UC Berkeley. We are have recorded a series of sociolinguistic/oral history interviews with speakers of Western and Eastern Armenian in the Bay Area and are now analyzing them sociolinguistically and phonetically. For more information, see the ALBA page of this website.

I'm still recruiting participants and research assistants for this project; if you or someone you know might like to get involved, please contact me!

Since finishing my honors thesis, I have continued to use the corpus to further analyze sound change in this community. My recent presentation for the American Dialect Society explored acoustic cues to tensing of the TRAP vowel in Rochester. In a related project, I investigated the somewhat ideosynchratic pronunciation of elementary in New York State.

Both of these projects are part of TRAP (The Rochester Accent Project), headed by Prof. Maya Ravindranath Abtahian at the University of Rochester.

In Summer 2022, I traveled to Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire as part of a team (with Katherine Russell, and Rebecca Jarvis) working to document and describe the Atchan (Ebrié) language.

Other related projects have included a socio-syntactic study of Ivorian French (presented at NWAV51; slides here) and a book chapter (forthcoming, with Hannah Sande and Maxime Dido) on language maintenance in Côte d'Ivoire. 

As an undergraduate student at the University of Rochester, I worked (with Nadine Grimm and Scott Grimm) on Bagyeli, Bulu, and Dagaare; I did fieldwork in Ghana in 2018. 

Language Revitalization

From May to December 2021, I helped members of the Chemehuevi Tribe on small projects related to revitalizing their language. We connected at the Breath of Life Archival Institute, where I helped the members to find and use documentary materials. For a term project for a course in language revitalization, I assembled a set of materials to pilot an at-home language nest to help re-introduce the language into the home.

Language revitalization forms a key aspect of the ALBA project: one of ALBA's main goals is to assist in the maintenance of the Armenian language in the Bay Area.

Archival work and other projects

With Hannah Sande, I worked on a typological survey of reduplication, examining cross-linguistic patterns in morphophonology and semantics, looking particularly at the extent to which echo reduplication and fixed segmentism are related phenomena.

I have built multiple collections of documentary linguistic materials for the California Language Archive (CLA). I also completed substantial archival projects with the 19th Ward Community Association History and Archives Committee (Rochester, New York) and the Longmeadow (Massachusetts) Historical Society, including building two interactive historical maps.

I worked in Scott Grimm's Quantitative Semantics Lab at the University of Rochester, where I completed a study of the semantics of English weak definites.