My research focuses on intraspeaker phonological variation, with equal emphasis on the empirical facts of this variation and its implications for phonological theory. I am interested in how stylistic variation is affected by speaker attitude and integration within a community of speakers, and how such variation is represented in the lexicon and grammar. My approach to investigating these questions is a multidisciplinary one, combining methodologies and insights from sociolinguistics as well as psychology, laboratory phonology, and phonetics, and reflects my assumption that a complete model of the phonological system will incorporate knowledge of how social factors and categories interact with this system, and will account for both the socially conditioned and the linguistically conditioned variation we observe in speech. In addition, my work is guided by the view that variationist data can and should be used to test and refine formal theoretical claims about how language works.
Recent Interests & Projects
Language Change Over the Lifespan. This crucial dialogue between data and theory is
the driving force behind my work on phonological change over the lifespan. All speakers
demonstrate some degree of synchronic variation in speech, adjusting their use of certain
variables to mirror an interlocutor, convey attitudes or identity, or otherwise reflect
aspects of the conversational context. However, speakers may also vary their language
over time as a result of changes in the social or linguistic milieu. An understanding of
how such change over the lifespan may occur is crucial to the broader study of language
variation and change, so that, for instance, sociolinguists may make informed use of tools
such as the apparent time assumption. It is also an important testing ground for
phonological theory: a complete model of the phonological system should account not
only for the synchronic facts of a speaker's system, but for how this system may respond
and change over time given new input.
To this end, my dissertation examines the ways in which speakers accommodate to
features which are not part of their native dialect, and uses these findings to evaluate two major theories of phonological representation: the classical, feature-based theory most famously articulated in Chomsky & Halle 1968, which holds that the phonological portions of lexical entries consist of abstract symbols with little phonetic substance (which are later spelled-out by phonetic implementation rules); and the episodic-memory based Exemplar Theory, which claims that “each word has its own history”, and that this
history is written in phonetically rich clouds of remembered tokens. These theories make
different predictions with respect to phonological change over the lifespan, and I evaluate
these predictions through two different studies: a sociolinguistic study of second dialect
acquisition in Canadian adults who have moved to the New York City region, and a
laboratory study of how adults shift their pronunciation of particular vowels after
listening to recordings of tokens spoken in another dialect.
Dissertation Title: Mergers and Acquisition: Linguistic and Social Factors Underlying Herzog's Principle.
Committee: Gregory Guy (chair), Lisa Davidson, Diamandis Gafos, John Singler, Peter Venkman.
Variation in Optimality Theory (OT). While my dissertation work focuses on how
sociolinguistic facts can shed light on phonological representation, I have also used
variationist data to study the nature of phonological processes, mostly within the OT
framework. In my work on variable final coronal stop deletion and categorical schwa
epenthesis in English past tense forms, I showed that the two mutually-bleeding
processes could not be accommodated in a single constraint ranking (without invoking
some serious theoretical kluges), and thus provided evidence for a multi-level theory of
OT. Similarly, my collaborative work with Arto Anttila, Vivienne Fong, and Stefan Benus has used variable
data from Singapore English to argue for a particular phonological architecture.
Articulation, Acoustics, and Community Variation. I am also interested in how
community language variation is both shaped by and reflected in the phonetic realizations
of linguistic variables. In work with Paul De Decker, I have studied (ae)-tensing in Mid-
Atlantic speakers both acoustically and articulatorily, using ultrasound to track tongue
gestures. Our work indicates that speakers from the same region and community (in our
case, young adults from Central New Jersey) may, from an acoustic standpoint, exhibit
qualitatively different (ae)-tensing systems, consistent with previous work. Moreover,
even those with the same acoustic system may vary in terms of how this system is
articulated. For instance, a speaker who uses tense (ae) exclusively before nasals may or
may not produce this variant using a lingual tensing gesture. This research raises
interesting questions for future study: to what extent do speakers have a “choice” with
respect to which articulatory strategy they employ, and how may these strategies be
socially distributed?
Publications
Presentations