I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania's Language Variation & Cognition Lab (PI: Meredith Tamminga).

​

My research focuses on what perception and production of sociolinguistic variation can tell us about the mental relationships between linguistic and social knowledge and the mechanisms underlying the inception and progression of sound change

 

I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020 and my Master's in Sociolinguistics from North Carolina State University in 2015. 

​

I am also affiliated with the Cultural Evolution of Language Lab and the Embick Lab at Penn. 

Recent News

July 10, 2020

Paper Published in PiHPh

My paper "Perceptual Learning, Talker Specificity, and Sound Change" with Meredith Tamminga, Robert Wilder, and Wei Lai, is now out in Papers in Historical Phonology.

April 24, 2020

Doctoral Dissertation Defense

I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation, entitled "The Linguistic and the social intertwined: Linguistic convergence toward Southern speech"

April 3, 2020

Paper Published in Cognitive Science

My paper with Gareth Roberts, "Linguistic Convergence to Observed Versus Expected Behavior in an Alien‐Language Map Task" is now out in Cognitive Science.

January 5, 2020

LSA Talks

I presented some of my dissertation research showing that "Speakers converge toward variants they haven't heard: The case of Southern monophthongal /ay/" at the LSA annual meeting.