My research interests span a range of topics within linguistics, although the main focus is on the study of speech sounds, and in particular speech production, from a variety of intersecting perspectives, including:
- Acoustics and articulation.
- Descriptive, historical, and comparative linguistic (typology).
- Language endangerment.
- Computational modelling.
The other strand of my research expertise is related to research methods and statistics. In particular, I am an enthusiastic advocate of Open Research (aka Open Science) and Bayesian inference.
For an overview of the research meta-models that inform my research, see the Meta page.
Current projects
Intrinsic vowel duration is the tendency for high vowels to be shorter and low vowels to be longer. In this project I will investigate if articulator origin-to-target distance is sufficient to explain vowel duration or if vowels include category-specific durational targets.
Project with Jeremy Steffman looking at how auditory priming effects are modulated depending on which hemisphere processes the speech signal.
In this project with Jessica Hampton and Simone De Cia, we are conducting a survey study of the vitality of Gallo-Italian in the north of Italy.
Past projects
The Many Speech Analyses project (with Timo Roettger and Joseph V. Casillas) set out to quantify the analytic flexibility in the speech sciences and explored how it affects our scientific conclusions. To that end, we asked speech researchers to analyse the same data set in order to answer the same research question.
The paper with the study results has been published in AMPPS (DOI 10.1177/25152459231162567, Research Compendium https://osf.io/3bmcp/).
In collaboration with Lejda Kapia, Josianne Riverin-Coutlée, and Stephen Nichols, we have investigate the sound system of Albanian.
The first objective of the project was to produce an IPA illustration for Tosk Albanian which has been published in JIPA (DOI 10.1017/S0025100322000044, Research Compendium https://osf.io/vry3h/).
Glossolects
The map shows in blue the main glossolects I work(ed) with, and in red glossolects I have studied during my time at University and forgotten to different degrees (approximate locations).
Overall, my interests and expertise cover the following macro-glossolects:
- Indo-European.
- Oceanic.
- South American.
I would very much welcome offers of collaboration on glossolects from other areas of the world, especially from Africa and Asia, which are alas the ones I am the least familiar with.