French speaker mobility and dialect adaptation
For my PhD, I am looking at adaptation in the native speech systems of French speakers who move away from their native French-speaking area to a region where a different dialect of French is spoken. For this project, I am interested in speakers who move between France and Quebec. Previous research has shown that extended contact with a second dialect of a native language can result in changes to a speaker’s accent. However, the extent to which second dialect exposure also results in perceptual change is less well understood. My research explores both types of changes through a series of experiments designed to evaluate mobile French speakers’ production and perception of French phonetic variables that vary cross-dialectally. In collaboration with Esther de Leeuw and Elisa Passoni, I conducted a preliminary study on this topic (testing the cross-dialectal perceptual discrimination of two Quebec French vowel contrasts), which was published in Languages.
I've also presented my work on the first experiment (a cross-dialectal speech-in-noise perception experiment) at ConSOLE32 (presentation accessed here) and at ICLaVE12 (accessed here) .
I also presented on the second experiment (on the categorical perception of /a ~ ɑ/) at the BAAP2024 conference, slides for which can be found here.
Pupillometry and accent familiarity
For this project (conducted in collaboration with Marc Barnard, Rémi Lamarque, Adam Chong), we are interested in exploring the relationship between listening effort in speech perception and pupil dilation as a physical indicator of cognitive effort. Specifically, we are testing changes in pupil size as a measure of the cognitive effort involved in listening to different accents that hold different levels of familiarity for listeners. To do this, we are playing listeners sentences produced by speakers of British English, American English, Glasgow English, and Chinese-accented English. Our hypothesis is that participants will show larger pupil dilation when listening to more unfamiliar accents as compared to more familiar ones.
Change in adjective intensifiers in French
In this project, I am interested in longitudinal change in the use of adverbial intensifiers (e.g. C'était très cool 'It was very cool') in spoken Hexagonal French (i.e. the French of continental France). Taking a quantitative sociolinguistic approach, I consider examples of intensifiers in a database (the ESLO) comprising two corpora of spoken French: one from around 1970 and the other around 2010. In tracking the trajectory of both grammatical and sociolinguistic change in the intensifier system of spoken French over this forty-year period, I compare intensifier usage in French to previous claims about intensifiers in previous (mostly anglocentric) variationist studies.
This study was recently published in Journal of French Language Studies and can be accessed here.
Slides from my NWAV51 presentation on this project can be found here.
Phonological priming of variable rhoticity in American and British English
Building on my thesis research, I aim in this project to determine the extent to which listeners' native phonology and amount of exposure to other dialects of their native language bias speeded word recognition across dialects. I do this by looking at variable rhoticity between American and British English. For instance, if an American listener hears the utterance [kɑd], are they more likely to perceive this word as 'cod' produced in an American accent vs. 'card' produced in a British accent? Furthermore, are Americans who have extensive second dialect exposure to British English better at exploiting supersegmental acoustic cues in a speech signal to disambiguate such cases in lexical recognition? My hypotheses for both of these questions are YES…listeners are biased in lexical recognition towards perceiving words aligning with the realizations for which they have more robust representations (i.e. those of their native dialect), but that this can be attenuated by extensive imput to sociophonetic variation in a second dialect.
Sociolinguistic priming of French word-final liquid deletion
As part of my Master's degree, I conducted a study examining the perception of word-final liquid deletion (e.g. confortable /kɔ̃fɔʀtab(l)/ 'comfortable', être /ɛt(ʀ)/ 'to be') in spoken French. As working-class speakers tend to delete more final liquids than upper-class speakers, I was interested in testing whether information about the social class of a speaker would influence listeners' perception of whether a word had undergone liquid deletion or not. Participants heard ambiguous words that could be interpreted either as containing no final liquid (e.g. coude [kud̚] 'elbow') or as containing an underlying yet deleted final liquid (e.g. coudre [kud̚] 'to sew'). The perceived social class of the speaker (working- or upper-class) was manipulated via photo stimuli. Although no priming effect was found for this social class manipulation, listener gender was found to predict listeners' perception of this variable.
A manuscript of this study can be found here.