My primary area of research examines how the interplay of factors affecting the physical (“phonetic”) aspects of speech can provide insights into speakers’ cognitive (“phonological”) representations of linguistic form. By elucidating the link between the phonetic and phonological dimensions of speech, my work enhances theories of linguistic knowledge by refining our understanding of how sound structure is represented in the human mind. The methodological framework that I use to answer my questions, known as laboratory phonology, studies the physical manifestations of speech with the goal of uncovering the systematic patterns that underlie seemingly “random” phonetic variation. I rely on this approach when forming hypotheses related to key themes surrounding the phonetics-phonology interface, including sociophonetics, sound change, prosodic structure, and bilingual phonetics. Conceptually, my findings improve our knowledge of the organization of sound systems within the human mind, consequently shedding light on the structure of language itself.
More recently, I have begun to develop research proposals that explore how cultural information is encoded in translation by developing methodologies to identify the transmission and/or loss of cross-cultural knowledge through analysis of massive text corpora and their translations—collaborative work I’m currently pursuing with colleagues affiliated with MIDAS across the University of Michigan