Recent work

Russian elision as lenition to zero

While there has been extensive documentation of elision in colloquial Russian speech (Iskandari et al., 2020; Vorob'eva, 2019; Evtjugina, 2019; Andrjushhenko, 2011; Pugh, 1993; Dahl, 1909), there is minimal phonetic research on its underlying causes. The present study performs an exploratory acoustic analysis on spontaneous Russian speech and ties its phonetic correlates to previously described lenition processes by demonstrating their continuous nature. Special attention is given to /v/ due to its sonorant-like qualities in Russian.  Furthermore, the study uses the results of this analysis to propose a framework for predicting elided forms using both language-general processes alongside word frequency.

Perception of Lexical Stress in Russian

This was a final project adapted from Dutch Listeners’ Perception of English Lexical Stress: A Cue-Weighting Approach by Annie Tremblay et al. (2021).  I examined the independent and overlapping effects of changing various acoustic correlates of stress in Russian speech on token perception of native speakers and advanced learners.  The study found that Russian speakers relied on duration and vowel quality cues relatively evenly when pitch was neutralized but prioritized each cue individually over pitch.  On the other hand, English speakers relied mainly on vowel quality and pitch, except for атлас, where duration became the major cue.

Russian-to-English Word Alignment Guide

I developed a manual for annotators on word-alignment issues between English and Russian as part of a project at Carnegie Mellon University with the ultimate goal to create a word-aligned corpus of UN documents.

Ambient Language Influence on the Babbling Inventory of Trilingual Infants

A group project using a pilot study to examine the consonant and vowel inventories of English-Russian-Hebrew and English-Russian-Spanish exposed infants.  The study found evidence that trilingual ambient language exposure influences infant babbling, both in phoneme inventory and prosody.  The younger infant (0;7) produced what previous studies refer to as “universal babbling” while the older infant (0;10) was produced “language-specific babbling.” 

Haitian Creole: Esther's Phonetics and Phonology

A group project describing the phonetics and phonology of an individual heritage speaker of Haitian Creole (HC). Beyond confirming existing literature on HC phonetics and prosody through speaker-informed translation of The North Wind and the Sun, I developed a series of ranked rules to uniquely derive a rhotic alternation previously unseen in the literature.

Um, well, знаете: Exploring connections between code-switching and discourse markers

A group project proposal to examine numerous accounts of discourse markers and code-switching within and across languages in order to motivate the claim that the two speech acts share functional and thus, distributional, similarities.  We propose a study that empirically investigates possible connections between these processes within monolingual and bilingual speakers of English, Spanish, Russian, and Mandarin and furthermore describe potential outcomes of the study and their respective implications on current research.

Creaky Voice in Bostonian Women

A group project investigating rates of creaky voice in audio recordings of women who grew up in the Greater Boston Area.  The study found that creak occured at a higher rate before voiceless consonants, pauses, or in phrase-final words. It also occured at a lower rate for taller speakers, as their height would naturally result in a lower F0. While we did not find an effect of education level or age, we found that creak had an increased likelihood of occurring in intervocalic position, suggesting a form of vowel hiatus resolution.