Research

My research is in experimental linguistics: phonetics, laboratory phonology, and psycholinguistics. I study how listeners use prosodic and voice-quality cues, such as tone, intonation, and phonation, in real-time spoken language processing, and how those cues are represented. I use laboratory and field experiments, acoustic analysis, and statistical modeling. I also apply these methods to language-related data science projects.

Current projects

Thai phonation and voice quality

Building on my previous work, this research examines phonation as an additional cue in Thai tone and intonation. It began as a descriptive look at how voice quality varies across tones and intonational contexts, and I’m now exploring how that variation can be modeled and how listeners use it in processing.

LanguageFinder

LanguageFinder was started by Catherine Brockway, and I’ve continued developing it with Connor Flynn and students. It’s an interactive Shiny app that maps language use and English proficiency across communities using custom-tabulated American Community Survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau, at the state, county, and tract levels. A team of Chaminade data science students extended it as their capstone, presenting at the Nā Liko Naʻauao symposium in 2026.

Past projects

Thai tone & intonation

How do lexical tone and sentence intonation interact in Thai, and which acoustic cues do listeners use to process each? I addressed this through a categorical perception study, a production study, and an eye-tracking study of real-time processing. Supervised by Amy Schafer (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa).

Stress in Pidgin (Hawaiʻi Creole)

Acoustic correlates of word-level stress in Pidgin, as a first step toward describing Pidgin intonation.

Structural probabilities in speech production in Japanese

With Nozomi Tanaka, a study of whether structural predictability in Japanese relative clauses shapes word duration during incremental production. Presented at ICPhS 2019. Read the proceedings.

Nasality in Lakota

With Ryan E. Henke, a study of whether orthography helps naive learners perceive the Lakota nasal vowel contrast, with implications for language revitalization teaching. Presented at ICLDC 2019.