I am currently a SSHRC post-doctoral research fellow at Oklahoma State University under the supervision of Valerie Freeman. I previously worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Manitoba under the supervision of Nicole Rosen. I completed my PhD (2022) and MA (2018) in Linguistics at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Jessamyn Schertz (PhD) and Yoonjung Kang (MA). I completed my B.A. (Hons) in Linguistics at Carleton University in 2017.
Research
I am a sociophonetician working on the production and perception of phonetic variation in North American English. I am particularly interested in how social and individual factors impact the perception of phonetic variation and how this relates to phonological category formation, as well as using online methodologies for widespread data collection and developing methods for quantifying social, individual and linguistic factors.
My dissertation focuses on variation in the perception of pre-velar /æ/-raising and how that relates to metalinguistic awareness, phonological context and individual production. My post-doctoral work with Nicole Rosen investigates sociophonetic variation (in production) in Manitoba, Canada as part of the Languages in the Prairies Project. My planned post-doctoral work with Valerie Freeman involves building an app and website to collect and disseminate data on the production of sociophonetic features from across North America.
My other research interests include gender-based sound symbolic patterns in given names, which I have investigated in English, French and Korean with Yoonjung Kang, the effects of individual cognitive differences on speech perception, linguistics pedagogy, particularly as relates to teaching and grading writing, and lexical realizational functional grammar (LRFG).
Teaching
I was a course instructor for a first year introductory course called Language in Context and a first year general interest course on languages in Canada at the University of Manitoba in 2023 and a third year psycholinguistics course at the University of Toronto in 2022. Prior to that, I TAed and graded multiple linguistics courses, including introductory courses, phonetics, psycholinguistics and statistics. I have also served as the Lead Writing TA (LWTA) for Linguistics at the University of Toronto. In this position, I helped integrate writing into designated courses through providing TAs with training on teaching and grading writing, assisting professors with developing writing activities and assignments and participating in specialized training on writing pedagogy to preform these duties. I’ve also been able to successfully implement the ideas I learned in this position to my other teaching positions, with positive feedback from students (i.e. students wanted and appreciated explicit writing instruction).
Web Design
Prior to studying linguistics, I worked as a web designer. My work in this area mostly involved designing and maintaining WordPress and static HTML websites. I currently use my skills in this area to implement online linguistics experiments using jsPsych.