I like thinking about the intersections between biology and culture. Here is an overview of some of my past and current projects.

Current

Spanish vowel and consonant contributions to talker identification and lexical contrast- This speech perception study considers the separable roles Spanish vowels and consonants play in helping listeners distinguish between different words or different speakers. It also addresses the question of whether the roles are the same in Spanish as in English. The aim of this work is to inform on whether said roles represent universal speech behavior or should be considered language-specific phenomena. A poster of the preliminary results of this investigation can be found here.

Past

Content-based instruction understood in terms of connectionism and constructivism– This work examines key features of Content-Based Instruction as they relate to an evolving cognitive science paradigm that explains learning through a dynamic systems approach weighted by the effect of experience and environment.

Acoustic [voice] correlate variation by dialect: data from Venezuelan Spanish– This article reports on the primary findings of my dissertation, a speech production study on the variable stop consonant pronunciation in two dialects of Venezuelan Spanish. The study surveyed 9 acoustic correlates that are known to cue the voicing distinction and found a significant difference in the overall energy measure (RMS) between the Mérida (Andean Highland) and the Margarita (Caribbean Island) phonologically voiceless stops. The study has repercussions for acoustic phonetic category marking and social indexing.