My ongoing research currently centers around three projects: cumulative markedness effects, phonology in non-native speech perception, and the phonology of Paraguayan Guarani.

cumulative markedness effects

My research on phonotactics centers on the effects that multiple instances of these infrequent sound patterns have on languages and its speakers, and if and how such effects are learned from the distributional properties of sounds in their language(s). For example, the English th sound occurs in frequent words such as think and teeth, but in English there are rarely any words with two or more th sounds and English speakers likely find words like '’theeth’’ to be weird potential words of English. Patterns such as this one, along with speakers’ intuitions about them, are interesting because infrequent sounds can have a stronger or weaker effect when they occur with another instance of a particular sound structure compared to when they occur independently, suggesting that these cumulative interactions among marked sound patterns are phonological properties that the speaker must learn. And, these patterns challenge mainstream models of linguistic knowledge in meaningful ways.

• One-shot vs. competitions phonotactics in modeling constraint cumulativity. [abstract] [slides] [proceedings] This work details the computational properties of two different maximum entropy model architectures, which I call ‘‘one-shot’’ and ‘‘multiple competitions’’ models of phonotactics. This work describes the findings for counting cumulativity – multiple vilolations of the same phonotactic pattern.

• Stay tuned for my dissertation!

Paraguayan Guarani

My research on Paraguayan Guarani centers on the language’s nasalization system. Paraguayan Guarani Tupian language spoken by 5 to 6 million people in Paraguay and neighboring areas of Argentina and Brazil. The nasalization system of Guarani is quite complex because the leftward and rightward spread of nasality is strikingly different, therefore making it particularly interesting from the perspective of phonological theory and learnability.

Papers

• Suffix independence in Paraguayan Guarani: stress, nasality and nasalization. Under review.

• Realizations of the tritonal pitch accent in Paraguayan Guarani, with Sun-Ah Jun, Jian-Leat Siah, and Hunter Johnson. Poster and proceedings paper at International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS). [poster] [proceedings]

• Nasal harmony in Paraguayan Guarani: Positional effects and the representation of nasality. MA Thesis, UCLA.

Presentations

• Paraguayan Guarani progressive nasalization as phonologically conditioned allomorphy. Presented at the Manchester Phonology Meeting (mfm) in 2025 [handout] [slides]

• Suffix independence in Paraguayan Guarani: stress, nasality, and nasalization. Colloquium talk at California State University, Fresno in 2025 [slides] [slides (no transitions)]

• Suffix independence in Paraguayan Guarani nasal harmony. Presented at SSILA in 2024. [abstract] [handout]

• Wh-question formation strategies in Guarani, with Hunter Johnson. Presented at SSILA in 2024. [handout]

non-native speech perception

More recently, I study how listeners perceive, or rather, misperceive, sound patterns that are unattested in their language. We know that listener’s knowledge of the distributions of sounds in their language play a role in speech perception because listeners often misperceive unattested sound sequences. However, the exact ways in which these sound sequences are misperceived vary greatly across speakers and languages. This project investigates the extent to which more abstract phonological knowledge, specifically knowledge of a language’s repair processes, influence non-native speech perception.

• I’m currently running online speech perception experiments with monolingual speakers of Korean to see if their misperceptions of illegal word-medial consonant clusters are consistent with the native repair processes of these clusters in Korean. I’m also comparing the predictions of various Bayesian models of speech perception that vary in their ability to encode information about the repair processes of the language.