Child Language Acquisition
I am particularly interested in the acquisition of complex prosodic structures (beyond the word level) investigating the connection between the more abstract phonological structure and representation of prosodic patterns and their developmental trajectory. I look at prosodic development in both how children produce and how they understand different prosodies between the ages of 5 and 12 years.

Laboratory Phonology
The approach I take in phonology is what can be considered “laboratory phonology” – seeking to address fundamental phonological challenges on the basis of experimental research, in particular acoustic data. My work focuses on prosody, an essential part of our communicative system at many different levels, encoding both linguistic information (e.g., word prominence, tonal distinctions, syntactic structure, and logical form) and non-linguistic information (e.g., pragmatic, emotional, and social information). The goal is to understand different aspects of prosodic systems across languages; how they are structured and processed, and how they interact with the phonological systems. So far, I have worked on more than 10 languages including stress, tonal, and no-stress systems.