Welcome!

I am a PhD student in the department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. My research interests are predominantly in sociophonetics and queer linguistics, although I’ve also been known to work in psycholinguistics (namely, child language acquisition) and heritage languages.

My current work focuses on a phenomenon known as phonetic convergence: a form of phonetic imitation where conversational partners begin to sound more (or sometimes less!) phonetically similar to each other. More specifically, this work investigates how gender non-conforming individuals may or may not uniquely utilize this phenomenon in order to index their identities. This includes investigation of the social meanings that these individuals may hold for certain acoustic-phonetic cues of gender (nonconformity), and how these meanings may or may not contribute to this form of gender identity construction as it arises from local interactions.

Related to queer linguistics, I also look at how children interpret/comprehend ambiguous pronouns that are not strictly associated with binary gender (e.g., singular they), and how this compares to adult individuals. Additionally, I am interested in the portrayals of gender nonconforming characters in fictional media (e.g., video games) and how the voices of these characters are constructed in order to index (or avoid indexing) gender nonconformity.