Research

I am a socio-phonetician in training who seeks to understand the variation and change in the sounds that are produced across the Spanish speaking world. I am especially interested in how certain sounds can index different meanings and associations, and what that can tell us about how people create and understand identities. I work closely with Caribbean Spanish speakers, Spanish-English bilingual speakers, as well as on topics related to Queer Linguistics. I typically employ traditional sociolinguistic and phonetic analyses, but I’m also interested in applying more experimental methodologies in order to better understand the processes at work.

Current Projects

Stereotypes of Gay Speech in Puerto Rican Spanish-English Bilinguals of Western New York
This project is serving to inform my Qualifying Paper. I am investigating what stereotypes Puerto Rican Spanish-English bilingual speakers in Western New York have in regards to gay male speech. I am analyzing for changes in pitch, vowel quality, and /s/ realization between speaker’s base voice and their imitation of a stereotypically gay sounding voice in order to see if social patterns emerge as well as to simply document the produced stereotypes.

Spanish in Oaxaca, Mexico
This project is being conducted with Dr. Christian DiCanio and Dr. Colleen Balukas. We are conducting analyses of phonetic data across structured, semi-structured, and un-structured tasks. Some goals of this project are to investigate the role of discourse type in the reduction/lenition of syllable structure, vowel/consonant/syllable length, and treatment of V-V sequences, especially at word boundaries. We are also interested in questions relating more broadly to features of Mexican Spanish (e.g. vowel devoicing or intonational patterns).