Research interests

Current projects and collaborations – Update coming soon!

Exploring dialectal trait production in Québécois popular music

This project focuses on detailing and describing for the patterning of phonetic dialectal traits of Québécois singers. For the purposes of this study, I developed a novel corpus of 34 Québécois singers who released a total of 132 albums (1,417 songs) between 2002 and 2021. Thus far, the following phenomena have been explored in this corpus:

• High-vowel laxing in closed final syllables
• Diphthongization
• Affrication
• The role of singers’ musical genre
• Change according to year of album release
• Change across careers

Future directions for this project include:

• Probe the role of song topic (e.g. love songs vs. songs with a political message)
• Nasal vowels
• Explore the impact of singer contact with out-of-dialect markets
• Compare dialectal trait production in speech to music

Investigating the link between intelligibility and attitudes in varieties of French

This project further tests the relationship between intelligiblity and attitudes with two varieties of French: Laurentian French and Hexagonal French. For these dialects, our data show that intelligibility and attitudes are not closely linked, however, attitudes and comprehensibilty (perceptions of speaker intelligbility) are linked. This project was developed under the supervision of Prof. Monica Nesbitt and Prof. Jeff Lamontagne.

Rhotic variation in Hatian Creole: in collaboration with David Tézil (University of Alabama – dtezil@ua.edu)

This project seeks to add to our understanding of variation and change as it occurs in creoles as well as phonological representations in creoles. Tézil’s (2019) thesis is the first large-scale variationist study on creole. Together, we are using the corpus he created of Haitian Creole speech to further explore the issues of rhotic variation in this creole. Thus far, we have found that rural speakers tend to produce /r/ as [w] more frequently than urban speakers do in monitored speech and that there is no effect of gender. We are continuing to code the monitored speech data, with the help of the two research assistants that I trained and manage. With more data, we aim to test bilingualism as a factor predicting frequency of [w] for /r/.

Issues in complex segment representations: Evidence from /ʎ/ in Occitan and Breton

Details coming soon!