I have two main research interests that fall under the broad categories of Sociolinguistics and Computational Linguistics.
- In Sociolinguistics, I enjoy working under the paradigm of Quantitative Variation. I work primarily in English dialectal Variation, particularly in the American South. So far, I have been doing research in the suburban area around Huntsville, AL. I'm interested in many different aspects of Southern English, including the Southern Vowel Shift, language change, monophthongization, and others.
- My mentor is Natalie Schilling-Estes, and I find her work fascinating.
- My dissertation is focused on perceptions of Alabama English by non-linguists and investigating the acoustic realities of these perceptions. My committee is made up of Dr. Natalie Schilling-Estes, Dr. Robert Podesva, and Dr. Crawford "Corky" Feagin.
- I am also interested in the ways people use language to construct their identities, both long- and short-term.
- Closely related are my interests in Language Change and my love affair with Praat Software. Sociophonetics is the greatest.
- In Computational Linguistics, I focus on Machine Translation. I have worked on projects for post-editing of Arabic to English MT.
- As a sort of crossover, I am interested in quantitative work on corpus linguistics and in Speech Processing of dialects.