Professional Data

About Me

Personal History
Thanks to the U.S. Navy, I was born in Bermuda and lived in Rhode Island and Alaska's Aleutian Islands before spending most of my childhood in Washington's Puget Sound area.  I grew up frequently hiking and camping in the Olympic and Cascade mountains.  The summer after graduating high school, I visited Germany for the first time with a GAPP program in Tuttlingen, Baden-Württemberg.  My college years were spent mostly in Seattle, except for a year studying abroad in Freiburg, also in Baden-Württemberg.  I spent several years in Seattle after graduation, and then moved to Bloomington, Indiana for graduate school.  Since then, I have spent time abroad in Reykjavik, Iceland as well as Krefeld, Nordrhein-Westfalen and Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg.  My family and I have returned to mountain views and wilderness hikes since moving to Calgary, Alberta in 2019.

Education
I graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle after earning a B.A. in Linguistics with a minor in Music and a B.A. in German Language & Literature with a History minor.  After several years out in the work force, I returned to school and earned my M.A. in Germanic Studies at Indiana University, all the while planning to pursue further training in Second Language Studies once the emerging department at IU was ready to take on applicants.  At IU, I received interdisciplinary training in historical linguistics, phonological theory, second language acquisition in general, and psycholinguistic experimental approaches to L2 phonology specifically.  I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Second Language Studies in May 2019, with outside minors in Linguistics and Germanic Studies.

Languages
Native: American English
Fluent Near-Native: German
Modern (some education): Turkish, Uzbek, Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic
Historical: Old Norse, Old High German, Old Saxon, Gothic, Middle High German

Research Interests
As a researcher of second-language (L2) phonology, I try to consider both the abstract arrangement of language sounds (general phonology) and specific problems of learnability when adults encounter new patterns in L2 (L2 phonology). This approach embraces the fundamental concerns of phonetics (study of the structure of language sounds), empirical methods employed to test hypotheses, theoretical and empirical principles of category perception, and the role of position-sensitivity in acquisition and the nature of non-linear phonological/phonotactic representations.

More broadly, my linguistics background emphasizes phonology, including historical Germanic linguistics, synchronic phonology (including Optimality Theory), L2 lexical acquisition, and some exploration of Chinese tone sandhi systems.
Our current research at the L2+ Sound Learning Lab is a project entitled Multi-Voice Aural Training for Adult Learners' Perception of Foreign Sounds and Spelling funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC Insight Development Grant 430-2021-00157).  We are investigating the acquisition of German consonants, vowels, and alphabetic literacy by Anglophone L2/L3 learners, both with and without prior experience with French, a common variable in western Canada. This research employs psycholinguistic experimental methods to measure the effect of targeted aural-phonetic training on how adult learners come to associate familiar and novel speech sounds with German spelling orthography, as well as the impact on vocabulary learning by early-stage foreign language learners.

Related Experience
Editorial Assistant, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2013-2014.