Palatalization in the UK

This project focused on the differences in how British English speakers might palatalize across word boundaries using the Audio BNC. The first portion of this project looked at the voiceless stop /t/ + you boundary. My contribution focused on how speech style and speaker region influence if someone says whatcha instead of what you and how this is not an outgrowth of reduction.

Voice Quality

My current work investigates how creak is realized in female speech and if creak is motivated for reasons other than prosody using data that was collected from speakers following the Human Communication Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh’s Map Task protocols

Internet Speech

This project follows the movement of tryna, an African American English word across Reddit, a website populated with primarily young, white, educated, male speakers and currently expanding to include other social media sites to track diffusion

Language and Identity

This project studies the formation of identity on a women’s roller derby team as they join a team and become absorbed in team culture along with surveying other teams in Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby to uncover national and international lexical trends with a current expansion into derby speak in social media