Department of Germanic Studies

Fields of Interest

acoustic and articulatory phonetics; phonology; historical linguistics; Germanic languages; Dinka; self-organization in phonology

Through my research, I investigate the role vowel sounds play in spoken communication. Some of my recent work has used vocalic portions of the speech signal to estimate individuals' vocal tract length, differentiate minor place contrasts within coronal consonants, and predict the identity of upcoming sounds in the speech stream. My dissertation research focuses on the emergence of vowel quality alternations (e.g. blood ~ bleed, mouse ~ mice) in Dinka-Nuer and early Germanic speech communities.