Profile
I am a sociophonetician with an interest in how we perceive and make use of the highly nuanced interconnections between fine-grained phonetic variation and variation in other aspects of our experience. My MPhil (supervised by Allan Bell) and PhD (supervised by Jen Hay) looked at the prevalence of American-accented singing in New Zealand, documenting how ‘Pop Song English’ is a context-dependent default in both the production and perception of sung voice for New Zealanders. These projects were part of a wider interest in the validity of performed and mediated data for sociolinguistic research, as explored in a 2011 theme issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics co-edited with Allan Bell.
As a post-doctoral research fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney, I worked on an Australian Research Council funded project led by Felicity Cox and Jonathan Harrington entitled ‘Child speech, community diversity and the emergence of sound change’. This project investigated how changes in progress in Australian English are developing for children with different language backgrounds and in more or less ethnolinguistically diverse neighbourhoods.