Research
Turn-taking
Collaborators: Tania Henetz, Eve V. Clark, Susan C. Bobb
Measuring turn-end boundary projection. It is widely accepted that in conversation we are tracking the current speaker's turn so that we can anticipate upcoming turn boundaries. This online anticipation allows us to converse with minimal inter-speaker gaps and minimal overlap. But, we don't know what linguistic and non-linguistic cues listeners use in turn-end projection as the speech signal is unfolding. This project uses Observer Gaze during conversation to investigate which cues are used by adult and child viewers.
Variation in turn-timing production. It seems that people take turns with brief timing across the world's cultures. Some language communities use slower timing than others, but in general, turn transitions between speakers range between 0 and 250 ms. In this work, I look at the sources of variation in turn-timing. Does it take longer to answer certain types of questions? What types of complexity in the linguistic response can cause a delay. I look at face-to-face conversation in adults and children.
First Language Acquisition
Collaborators: Eve V. Clark, Patricia Amaral
Children use hedges as cues to category membership. This study investigates whether or not children are sensitive to the use of hedges (like 'almost' or 'sort of') and, if so, whether or not they associate hedges to objects that are incomplete or non-prototypical.
Second Language Acquisition
Collaborators:
Meghan
Sumner,
Melinda
Woodley,
Eve V.
Clark, Annette D'Onofrio, Jared Bernstein.
The Paris Project. Most studies of second language acquisition focus on the data of very proficient learners, who may have variable ages of second language onset or acquisition. Recent work, e.g. Chang (2010), has shown that some second-language learning phenomena, such as L2 to L1 transfer effects can begin to occur in the first weeks of language-learning. The Paris Project is a 6-week longitudinal database of American English speakers who enrolled in beginning French immersion courses in Paris over the summer of 2011. Subjects were tested weekly for changes in their production and perception of English and French as their course of study proceeds. Please visit the project's main page for more information about this study!
Non-native long-lag voice onset time (VOT): Insights from a distribution-based analysis. Results show that in production, non-native speakers do not fall into neat categories according to their age of second language onset, but instead appear to fall into groups that cross learning age categories, demonstrating variable paths in acquisition.
Variable paths in L2 acquisition. Following from the non-native long-lag VOT research above, this project explores different acquisitional paths that appear in the phonetic properties second language learners of varied learning ages, daily use, and backgrounds. In addition to replicating previous results, the goal of this investigation is also to characterize the different ways of learning.
Speech perception
Collaborators: Meghan Sumner, Jack Tomlinson, Marie-Catherine deMarneffe, Roey Gafter, Chigusa Kurumada
Effects of frequency and within-speaker variation in non-native speech perception. Previous work has shown that exposure to multiple speakers of with a non-native accent produces robust learning effects. This project investigates the effect of within-speaker variation, using French-accented English.
Integrating frequency, formality, and phonology in speech perception. Frequency of a linguistic cue is a key factor in how quickly and accurately it is comprehended, however we show that more frequent forms are not uniformly privileged, given an appropriate context. In prep.
Accentedness vs. Intelligibility. Several studies have found discrepancies between speakers' level of accentedness and comprehensibility. We propose that these discrepancies can be better understood through the investigation of productive overlap in a distributional analysis of variation.
Teaching
Mentor TA (Linguistics 394). Teaching Assistant for Professor Beth Levin, training new TAs. Stanford University, Autumn 2012
Language Acquisition I (Linguistics 140/240). Teaching Assistant for Professor Eve V. Clark. Stanford University, Autumn 2009, 2011
Guest lecture: Introduction to Bilingualism. Stanford University, Autumn 2009. Language Acquisition I (Linguistics 140/240) with Professor Eve V. Clark.
Guest lecture: Conversational Skills I. Stanford University, Autumn 2011. Language Acquisition I (Linguistics 140/240) with Professor Eve V. Clark.
Guest lecture: AAVE: Perspectives from Acquisition. Stanford University, Winter 2010, 2011, 2012. African American Vernacular English (Linguistics 65/265) with Professor John R. Rickford
Other roles
Linguistics Lab TA for the 2010-2011 school year.
SPLaT! co-coordinator: we are always looking for interesting talks to present at our Psychology of Language biweekly tea and talk. We encourage you to send along your requests and suggestions for speakers and snacks!
Voices of California Project member: we are documenting the speech of California one distinctive town at a time. The inaugural year of the project we visited Merced, and the following year we visited Redding. This year we will be interviewing life-long residents of the Bakersfield area. If you are interested in scheduling an interview or would like to talk to me about the project, please feel encouraged to do so!
Contact
Links
Last updated July 2011.