I am currently a research associate (postdoc) at Haskins Laboratories at Yale University. I am funded through a National Science Foundation grant with Douglas Whalen (PI). Under the grant, we are investigating the phonetics of various endangered languages using corpus documentation data. The idea here is to determine the validity of documentation data for creating descriptive phonetic work and, furthermore, for responding to theoretical questions in the phonetics literature using corpus methods.
I completed my Ph.D. in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley in December 2008, under the direction of Keith Johnson, Ian Maddieson, Larry Hyman, and Johanna Nichols. Prior to my employment at Haskins, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the laboratory "Dynamique du Langage" at Université Lumière, Lyon 2 in France, funded by a grant from the Fyssen Foundation.
By training, I am a phonetician and a fieldworker. I am interested in many aspects of speech production and perception, but my research has focused mainly on tone, phonation type, laryngealized consonants, and gemination. Apart from this, I am generally interested in linguistic description, morphophonology, lexicography, and ethnobotany.
Since 2004, I have done fieldwork on San Martín Itunyoso Trique, a Trique language (Oto-Manguean) spoken in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca, Mexico. In Fall 2009, I began collaborating on fieldwork on the Ixcatec language, a moribund Oto-Manguean language in Oaxaca, Mexico with only a few remaining speakers. This project is funded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Language Project with linguists Michael Swanton (Leiden University) and Denis Costaouec (Univ. Paris V, CELIA) as principle investigators and Evangelina Adamou (Univ. Paris III, LACITO) as a collaborator. Some preliminary results of this work were presented at the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of America (SSILA) conference in January 2011.
In Fall 2010, I began collaborating on fieldwork on Yoloxóchitl Mixtec, a little-described Oto-Manguean language in San Luis Acatlán, Guerrero, Mexico. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation with linguist Jonathan Amith (Gettysburg College) as the principle investigator and Rey Castillo (CIESAS) and William Poser (Univ. British Columbia) as collaborators.