Research

Here are my main ongoing projects:

1. I maintain a corpus of Quebec French speech data, the AssNat parliamentary corpus originally collected by Peter Milne (described in his thesis). I’ve led work that has tripled the amount of audio data and collected speaker metadata to allow for sociolingusitic analyses. The corpus is planned to be made public soon, but for the time being you can request access here.

2. I study sound change in Quebec French (using the aformentioned corpus). I’m especially interested the development of rhoticity in the vowels /ø, œ, œ̃/, which is a typologically rare sound change. Using generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs), I examine the change in formant trajectory shape in apparent time and describe the social and regional patterning of rhoticity. Ultimately, this project aims to address questions relating to the actuation and spread of sound change.

3. I also work on the acoustic dynamics of sibilants. Recent work (not yet published) explores variability in acoustic dynamics of /s/ both within and across languages in the large-scale GlobalPhone read speech corpus, using functional principal components analysis (fPCA) to determine the primary dimensions of variation.

4. I am at the early stages of a collaboration with Prof. Jane Stuart-Smith (University of Glasgow), where we will be investigating the articulatory and acoustic dynamics of rhotic consonants in Scottish English and other Englishes.