Research

Variation

My Master’s thesis, and subsequent manuscript, investigated the influences of familiarity and (perceptions of) standardness on the comprehension of Southern United States English. Standardness drove ERP responses, while familiarity drove acceptability and intelligibility judgments. This summer, I plan to bring our mobile EEG system to Southern communities to understand the impacts of immersion and active dialect use on processing.

Switching

I am currently working on a language switching project with my adviser, Janet van Hell; Navin Viswanathan (Communication Sciences and Disorders); and Sarah Paterno and Victoria Medina, research assistants in the BiLD Lab. We designed a series of online behavioral studies to investigate intra-sentential Spanish-English code-switching detection and comprehension in noise. We will also investigate the effects of pre-switch acoustic-phonetic features in an EEG study.

Contact

I received an NSF-funded Partnerships for International Research and Education Fellowship, postponed until 2022 due to COVID-19, to conduct field research with John Lipski (Spanish and Linguistics) on the northern coast of Colombia. My project will translate lab-based methods—including lexical decision, word association, and network science—to an in situ study of bilingual language control in Palenquero-Spanish (creole-lexifier) speakers.

Distance

Typological distance affects a variety of linguistic behaviors, including code-switching production, language learning, and online comprehension in bilinguals. I am interested in using network science to quantify the (dis)similarity between different language varieties. Lizz Karuza (Psychology) and I published an opinion piece to advocate for the use of multiplex methods in psycholinguistics.