Current Research
My main research interests are the phonetic and phonological description of tone via experimental work. I consider myself an experimental phonologist and phonetician, but I have an extensive background in phonological theory, and as such I am interested in the impacts that phonetic findings can have on phonological theory. I am currently doing research on phonetic cue conflicts where f0 is simultaneously affected by laryngeal features of a consonant and also by an adjacent tonal feature on a vowel. This situation arises in dialects of Korean, where pitch accent H tone targets interact with laryngeal effects of tense obstruents (f0 lowering). In order to rectify this conflict, speakers tend to delay the pitch accent peak H-tone targets. I am investigating whether the same peak-delay strategy is employed by speakers of Tokyo Japanese, where possible f0-lowering effects may also be seen with sonorant and voiced obstruent consonants. On the other hand, Fukushima Japanese does not have any pitch accent system and should not have any such peak delay then. These predictions will be tested.
Past Research
My dissertation investigated the phenomenon of consonant-tone interaction, where in some languages, restrictions exist on which consonants and tones can be adjacent. I focus on Thai, where voiced stop and voiceless unaspirated stop onset consonants are never found immediately preceding high and rising tone vowels. I ran a production study, where it was discovered that among the Thai onset consonants, only voiced and voiceless unaspirated stops are produced with significant glottal constriction. Finally, I ran an experiment that explores how speakers of Thai judge nonce words that contain illicit sequences of onset consonants and tones. While there is much research on illicit segmental sequences, there is considerably less on illicit sequences containing both segmental and tonal units.
My MA thesis, completed at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Douglas Pulleyblank, explored ATR harmony in Yorùbá. Through field work with a speaker of the Mọba dialect of Yorùbá, I discovered that the domain of harmony differed from the standard dialect. I then proposed an Optimality-Theoretic account to account for this. A preliminary version of this research was presented at the 35th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) in 2004.
I have also co-authored conference presentations (with Dr. Seunghun Lee) that have explored both the phonological and phonetic aspects of tone in Korean and Du’an Zhuang, a minority language of China. I have also been interested in the role of creaky phonation and have employed psychoacoustic roughness recently in addition to spectral tilt measures, showing that it has higher correlation with laryngeal constriction than spectral tilt for speakers of Burmese and Thai, but about the same for Korean speakers. Finally, my second qualifying paper at Rutgers explored the location of main sentential prominence in English and I have recently done some research on prosody in Japanese L2 learners of English.