My primary research interest is non-standard orthography on social media and how people assign and interpret the meanings of such patterns. I've work mostly with Twitter due to it's easily accessible data and widespread use and familiarity.

My dissertation research focused mostly on the all caps pattern, which I hypothesize to be related to prosodic cues such as full-phrase increases in volume, pitch, and/or quality. After beginning with all caps, I expanded my research to include other patterns which I suspect to have prosodic correlates, such as single-word caps (only one word in the sentence is capitalized), increasing caps (the word/phrase becomes all caps partway through), alternating caps (capitalization changes every few letters in a word), all lowercase, repeated letters, repeated exclamation points and question marks, and punctuation after several consecutive words.

I have tested these hypotheses using production studies in which I asked people to read tweets out loud. Phonetic analyses on the results of these studies demonstrate how people interpret non-standard orthography verbally. See my full dissertation paper for further details!