Research

The main topic of my doctoral thesis. I'm working on developing a probabilistic framework for evaluating comparative reconstructions in historical lingistics. The framework takes an entire reconstruction as input and yields the likelihood that the reconstruction could have been substantiated with a random language (i.e. wordlist). Evaluating the reconstruction instead of the wordlist directly allows for the comparison of competing reconstructions and adheres more closely to theoretical assumptions. The aim for this research is to aid in the debate surrounding controversial language groupings and propel the comparative method further into the past.

Ongoing research assistantship. We are interested in sound~gender correlates in Russian names, both from a corpus perspective and an experimental perspective. The particular focus for this project is the perception of the Russian 4-way voiceless sibilant contrast /s, s^j, ʂ, ɕ/ in relation to gender. The aim for this research is to add to the list of cross-linguistic accoustic sound symbolic fetures and identify their source.

We are interested in using accoustic measurements to ascertain if coordination involving unmarked or differentially marked objects in Romanian is regular nominal coordination or sentential coordination with ellipsis. The aim for this project is to reveal the syntactic nature of differentially marked objects in Romanian and other languages.

We are interested in finding pragmatic~phonetic correlates in Russian. We focus on four types of statements: true (information-seeking) questions, confirmative declarative questions, echo declarative questions, assertions. The aim for this project is to further our insight into the pragmatic~phonetic interace.

A series of meta-studies conducted on researchers from the University of Toronto conducting socio-linguistic research in Ontario. For every trip, vowel formant measurements of every participating researcher are extracted before departure, in the field, and upon return. The purpose is to measure the degree to which speakers alter their speech in unfamiliar linguistic environments. So far, data has been collected from trips to Parry Sound (2018) and Marmora (2019).