I am an Assistant Professor in French linguistics at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. I received a PhD in Linguistics from MIT (my academic tree).
My research explores the various factors that affect how words are pronounced, with a specific (although not exclusive) focus on French varieties and creoles. Recently, I have been particularly interested in investigating how morphological information (part of speech, paradigm structure, etc.) shapes fine-grained details of word pronunciation. For instance, in a recent paper published in Glossa, I showed that morphosyntactic structure is relevant to the way words are pronounced in French, with derived words being more likely to feature a schwa at the stem-suffix boundary than inflected words. In another recent paper published in the Proceedings of the 2021 Annual Meeting on Phonology, I argued for the role of morphological optimization (homophony avoidance and boundary signaling) in the pronunciation of Haitian pronouns. In a manuscript currently under review, I provide evidence for the role of paradigm uniformity in the ambiguous patterning of French liaison consonants as liaison enchaînée or non-enchaînée.
I investigate these questions using theories developed in formal linguistics (constraint-based grammars, in particular), experimental data (acoustic data, perceptual data, judgment data, artificial language learning data), and statistical modeling (Bayesian hierarchical modeling, probabilistic constraint-based grammars).
I have extensive teaching experience in all main subfields of general linguistics, going from phonology to formal semantics, as well as in quantitative research methods.