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Our latest major project, MI Diaries, just received NSF funding! We're still recruiting research team members, community partners, and new diarists - click the logo below to visit the project website and find out more!
Our latest major project, MI Diaries, just received NSF funding! We're still recruiting research team members, community partners, and new diarists - click the logo below to visit the project website and find out more!
I'm an Assistant Professor of Sociolinguistics at Michigan State University. With Suzanne Wagner, I'm the co-director of the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab. I'm a quantitative sociophonologist -- what does that mean? First, it means I study phonology (sounds!) - with a particular focus on phonological variation and change. I look at the sociolinguistic aspects of sound variation: how it is affected by the macrosocial (like how an entire city is changing its pronunciation over time) as well as the microsocial (like how certain sounds index a speaker as sounding "tough"). And the quantitative part? I use quantitative methods to analyze sociophonological variation. Check out my research page to learn more!
I did a postdoctoral fellowship from 2018-2020 in the Learning and Development Lab at Georgetown University with Elissa Newport, where I used miniature artificial language experiments to investigate the way that children acquire sociolinguistic and phonological variation. I received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018, where my primary advisor was Bill Labov. My dissertation work focuses on the way that dramatic structural sound change (i.e., phonological change) is represented and produced by individual speakers during the change.