Current and ongoing research projects:
Documentation and analysis of an ethnic variety of American English spoken by Japanese Americans interned in concentration camps during World War II:
Little to no research has been done on the speech of Japanese American immigrants to the United States. In particular, no special focus has been placed on the unique experience this community had during forced relocation and internment in concentration camps during the war years. Recordings made of speakers from this nisei generation reveal a unique way of speaking, but little explicit sociophonetic analysis of their speech has thus far been done, nor has the extent to which it may be dialectally systematized or situationally stylistic. My second qualifying paper will investigate the properties of this dialect and attempt to situate it within theories of language variation in immigrant communities.
Longitudinal morphosyntactic analysis of African American English:
Handout for Coding and Transcription Protocols for DDM analysis
For several years now, the bulk of my research focus has revolved around analyzing the development of African American English (AAE) in the speech of children. The data come from a longtiudinal corpus housed in the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. Independently, and in partnership with Walt Wolfram, my work has focused largely on conducting morphosyntactic analysis of variation in the speech of children over the early lifespan. Primarily, I have used a Dialect Density Measure (DDM) to count the relative number of AAE features per utterance of speech, as a means of operationalizing "vernacularity" for these speakers at different points in the lifespan. Using the DDM as a variable in regression analysis has been useful in associating the use of AAE with other social measure such as academic achievement, mental health, ethnic identity, demographic information, and more. In addition, I've conducted dyadic analysis between the children and their mothers' and peers' speech. And, recently our team has successfully collected post-high school interviews with the 60+ speakers remaining in the sample, adding another time point to the longitudinal analysis. I'm currently busily at work analyzing these transcripts.
Acoustical analysis of sibilants in Redding, CA:
Together with Rob Podesva, I am analyzing the sibilants /s/ and /ʃ/ in the speech of white speakers from Redding, California. Not only are we attempting to refine acoustic measurement methodology for these consonants, but we are also seeking to ascertain how these are features are used by speakers with "country" orientation vis-à-vis those with "town" orientation, as well as considering the other social factors of sex, age, and education. Additionally, we are focusing in particular how this feature is utilized by speakers in the local LGBT community.
Syntactic structure of the Lithuanian noun phrase:
For my first qualifying paper, I focused on the syntactic structure of the Lithuanian noun phrase. Specifically, I investigated how the movement and extraction properties of prenominal elements in the noun phrase may or may not be direct extraction, or copy/movement with variable PF interpretation. Some linguists of Slavic languages have posited a link between a language's possession of definite articles and the inability to extract prenominal elements in that language. Lithuanian shares a lot of similar properties to Slavic languages, including the ability to extract prenominal elements. However, Lithuanian differs from most Slavic languages in that it has a definiteness marker. With this paper I was able to show that extraction phenomena in Lithuanian have little or nothing to do with the existence of a DP, but rather have everything to do with contrastive marking on elements of the noun phrase. My superivising committee for this project were Vera Gribanova, Tom Wasow, and Penny Eckert.
Acoustical analysis of vowels in Redding, CA:
Together with Rob Podesva, Annette D'Onofrio, Jeremy Calder, Isla Flores-Bayer, Hsin-Chang Chen, and Seung Kyung Kim, we are analyzing the vowel space of speakers from Redding, California. Specifically, we are investigating whether speakers who are "country" oriented likewise exhibit characteristics of Southern vowels (consistent with migration patterns to the area), and whether speakers who are "town" oriented aim for urban California vowel targets. We're also looking if sex, education, and age factor into these patterns as well.
Acoustical analysis of voice-onset time in Korean stops:
Together with Rob Podesva, Annette D'Onofrio, Jeremy Calder, Eric Acton, Hsin-Chang Chen, Sam Bowman and Benjamin Lokshin, we are investigating the effects of linguistic and social factors on phoneme categorization of Seoul Korean stops. We are seeking to see where and how acoustical manipulation of voice-onset time (VOT) for Korean stops affects the perceptual determination of either lenis or aspirated stops. So far, our experiments with 30 native speakers of Seoul Korean, all of whom listened 10 speakers' productions of /CVn/ tokens which had been manipulated incrementally for voice-onset time, show that the listeners are significantly likely to use social factors as well as phonetic cues to categorize stops as either lenis or aspirated, to differing degrees. Therefore, it so far appears as though social information is as important as phonetic information in perception for these features.
Acoustical analysis of consonantal variation in ethnic American Englishes:
I've also long been concerned with how ethnic identity is manifest in phonetic production, particularly in lesser-studied features such as consonants. Particularly, I've examined the consonant /l/ in two ethnic communities: African Americans from central North Carolina and Mexican Americans from Southern Texas. I've been primarily concerned with refining measurement methodology for /l/ as well as examining what, if any, change this feature is exhibiting over apparent time in these communities, and examining neighboring European American communities as well to see the extent to which the feature is parallel, divergent, or convergent over time. Particularly with the African Americans my apparent time approach has been longitudinally extensive, including the analysis of ex-slave recordings in addition to living speakers. In addition to /l/, for the Mexican Americans, Erik Thomas and I have investigated these patterns in other relevant consonants, including /r/, VOT, and /ð/. Thus far, this work has shown how consonantal variation can be powerfully indicative of ethnic identity and changing perspectives in communities over time.
English as a world language:
Not only is English's power, for better or for worse, clearly evident in the legacy of British colonization worldwide, but in the last centuries, we've seen English emerging as a lingua franca even in countries with no colonial connection to the language. And, in some cases, it is no longer a lingua franca as much as it has become an alternative national language. To what extent is koineization occuring in such places, where English is no longer spoken as a foreign language/lingua franca, but is instead exhibiting systematic features and variation characteristic of these speakers and their heritage languages? Particularly as it is manifest in the European context, this question has fascinated me for several years now. My work on the English spoken by Lithuanian learners is an attempt to see how and when this systematization occurs, if at all, and what underlying interactions with the native language affects the process.
