About
Hi! I'm a 3rd year PhD student in Linguistics at Northwestern University. I am interested in questions about how different aspects of intonational form function to mark distinctions in semantic or pragmatic meaning. So far, I've approached these questions from the perspective of the listener through speech perception experiments.
I am currently developing my Dissertation Prospectus, which will investigate the intonational correlates of mirativity (linguistic marking of speaker surprise) in Mainstream American English. I'm also interested in how prosody is used to encode information structure. My Qualifying Paper investigated the relationship between perceived prosodic prominence and the number of focus alternatives relevant in a particular discourse situation. I am advised by Jennifer Cole.
At Northwestern, I'm affiliated with the Prosody and Speech Dynamics Lab and the Experimental Meaning Group.
Before coming to Northwestern, I obtained a BA in Linguistics from The Ohio State University, where I worked in the Language Sciences Research Lab on gauging children's abilities to interpret intonational cues to stress and focus in their native language, and in the Prosodic Phonology Lab on adults' ability to acquire typologically rare stress patterns in an artificial language.
Recent projects
- F0 Correlates of Perceived Speaker Surprise in American English: Accents vs. Edge Tones. (with Thomas Sostarics and Jennifer Cole). Oral presentation at 3rd International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI 2025). Slides.
CV
You can find my most recent CV here (Last updated 5/6/2025).