Brief Biography

I specialize in theoretical phonology and on the relationship between phonology and phonetics in natural language grammars. As part of my research, I am committed to carrying out descriptive fieldwork on underdescribed and endangered languages. I have focused my efforts in this area on Coatzospan Mixtec, an indigenous American language spoken in Southern Mexico and belonging to the Otomanguean family. I am currently undertaking a project focusing on the phonetic implementation of contrastive tones in Coatzospan Mixtec. On a more applied level, I have collaborated with one of my students, Kelley Vance, on the creation of a picture dictionary to introduce a practical orthography for use in the Coatzospan Mixtec community. I am also involved in work on the phonetics and phonology of Eastern Andalusian Spanish, of which I am a near native speaker. Current research in this domain focuses on the phonetic implementation of word-internal s-aspiration, or more broadly, coda aspiration. Both my research on Coatzospan Mixtec and Eastern Andalusian stem from data collected in my fieldwork.