SOUND CHANGE · SPEECH PROSODY · TYPOLOGY
I am a Ph.D. student in Linguistics at The Ohio State University, where I work with Rebecca L. Morley and Björn Köhnlein. I am a phonologist interested in the mechanisms of sound change, particularly prosodic change in Germanic languages and languages of Southeast Asia, including Austronesian and Tai varieties. My broader empirical interests extend to Tibeto-Burman and Indic languages.
A central goal of my research is to understand synchronic phonological grammars and lexical representations from a diachronic perspective. I investigate how sound change, learning, and language transmission shape the emergence, organization, and stability of phonological systems, and what their histories can reveal about present-day contrasts. More broadly, I ask how far diachronic mechanisms can account for synchronic patterns and typological asymmetries without presupposing markedness constraints or specialized learning biases.
I also examine how children and adults perceive, learn, and transmit phonetic variation. I am particularly interested in when variation becomes phonologized, why some contrasts persist across generations while others weaken or disappear, and how these outcomes illuminate both change and stability. Methodologically, I combine computational modeling and simulation, mathematical analysis and modeling, cognitive modeling, and corpus analysis.
Updates
I presented a poster on Cantonese tone near-merger at Speech Prosody 2026 in Philadelphia.
Research
I study how the historical development of sound systems can inform our understanding of synchronic phonological grammars and lexical representations. Tracing the emergence of prosodic contrasts helps me evaluate analyses of their present-day organization.
I ask how phonetic variation becomes phonologized and how contrasts persist, weaken, or disappear across generations. My work examines the roles of children and adults in perception, learning, and language transmission.
Across Germanic and Southeast Asian languages, I investigate why some prosodic patterns are common while others remain rare but stable. I test how far sound change and transmission can explain typological asymmetries without presupposing markedness constraints or specialized learning biases.
Projects
Many languages distinguish short and long vowels, but stable three-way quantity systems are much rarer. This project asks whether apparent ternary vowel length should be represented as a simple extension of moraic quantity, or whether such systems require a different prosodic analysis. Based on acoustic data from the Leer dialect of East Frisian Low German, we show that the long–overlong contrast is primarily durational, extends beyond the classical monosyllabic environment, and is not reducible to vowel quality, lexical tone, or residual consonant voicing. We argue instead that overlength reflects a difference in metrical structure: long and overlong vowels are both bimoraic, but they are parsed into different kinds of trochaic feet.
Near-merger is often treated as a transitional stage between contrast and merger, but it may also be a stable outcome of production–perception dynamics. This project develops a computational model of the Cantonese T2–T5 contrast, separating production and perception while allowing them to interact through lexical experience. The model shows that lexical structure matters: minimal-pair words promote contrast-enhancing hyperarticulation, while singleton words allow undershoot and category drift. The result is a theory of near-merger as an equilibrium state, where small production differences can persist even when perception becomes unreliable. More broadly, the project asks how functional load shapes the stability, loss, and reorganization of phonological contrasts.
Khmer is often described as having fossilized historical prefixation but productive compounding. This project asks whether that contrast can be demonstrated quantitatively, rather than assumed from traditional description. Using corpus-based measures of productivity, semantic transparency, and semantic-shift structure, I compare historical prefix families with subordinate and coordinate compound families. The results complicate a simple fossilized-versus-active division: family size and hapax-based productivity alone do not distinguish historical prefixation from compounding, and some prefix families retain coherent stem-to-derived-form semantic shifts. The clearest contrast instead lies in the organization of semantic shift: productive subordinate compounds are more semantically constrained relative to family size, while prefix families show broader historical dispersion.