I’m a linguist who studies the variability inherent in language. In my research, I analyze statistical patterns in large bodies of speech data in order to better understand how and why people talk differently.
I am a co-director of the NYU Sociolinguistics Lab; an Area Editor in the area of Sociolinguistics and Anthropological Linguistics for Linguistics Vanguard; and one of the academic leads of Our Dialects, an online atlas of British English regional dialects. In addition to publishing academic articles and book chapters on sociolinguistics, language variation, language change, dialectology, and linguistics pedagogy, I have served as an expert consultant for media pieces on regional dialects, language change, personal names, and how speakers’ accents can change over time.
PhD in Linguistics, 2012
University of Pennsylvania
BA in Linguistics, 2006
University of California, Berkeley
BA in French, 2006
University of California, Berkeley
APRIL 2022 Just published, in Linguistics Vanguard (ahead of print): Regularization in the face of variable input: Children’s acquisition of stem-final fricative plurals in American English, with Chiara Repetti-Ludlow.
JANUARY 2022 Spring teaching: undergraduate Language and Society, with Lisa Davidson.
OCTOBER 2021 Just published, in Language Variation and Change: New and old puzzles in the morphological conditioning of coronal stop deletion, with Meredith Tamminga.