My primary research area is variationist sociolinguistics, specifically sociophonetics. In this area, I am especially interested in language and dialect contact phenomena, such as the segmental and suprasegmental features of Spanish-influenced varieties of English as well as other ethnic varieties of North American English. I am also conducting research on contact varieties of Spanish in the Americas, including New Mexican and Peruvian Spanish. A second research focus of mine is the quantitative analysis of grammatical constructions and their discourse functions, including information structure constructions and discourse markers. In my work on Oklahoma Cherokee, I am applying phonetic methods to language revitalization in the context of the complex tone phonology of Cherokee.

Educational History:

• Ph.D in 2011, Rice University (Linguistics) "Local Sociophonetic Variation in Speech Perception" (directed by Nancy Niedzielski)

Research Interests:

Sociophonetics, Language and dialect contact; Quantitative corpus linguistic approaches to grammaticalization and discourse analysis; Western Cherokee, Language Revitalization

Teaching Interests:

Representative Courses:

• Ling 303 Phonetics
• Ling 304/504 Phonology
• Ling 331/531 Language in Society
• Ling 433/533 Sociolinguistic Variation
• Ling 539 Sociophonetics

• Ling 510 Statistical Methods in Linguistics