Our team
Main researchers
Beth MacLeod
Associate Professor
My work focuses on the perception and production of phonetic variation. I am especially interested in the phenomenon of phonetic imitation, which is when a person’s pronunciation changes to sound more similar to someone they are talking to or listening to. My work considers a range of questions about phonetic imitation including which aspects of pronunciation change when people do this, why they do it, under what conditions, and what all of this can tell us about the nature of speech perception and production.
Tamara Sorenson Duncan
Associate Professor
My research program investigates language and literacy development in diverse populations. To date, this work has included children from immigrant and refugee backgrounds, children with developmental language disorder and children with autism spectrum disorder.
Karen Jesney
Associate Professor
Karen Jesney’s research focuses on how the sounds of language are represented in the human mind (phonology), and especially how sound patterns are learned by children. She uses a wide range of methodologies in her work, including speech perception and elicitation experiments, statistical analysis of longitudinal child data, traditional phonological analysis, and computer simulation. Her current research projects look at the acquisition of French liaison and other lexically-variable patterns, and at different means of measuring acquisition within corpus data.
Student lab members
Lisa Sullivan
Post-doc
Lisa Sullivan is a SSHRC post-doctoral fellow. Her research primarily focuses on the production and perception of sociophonetic variation in North American English. She is interested in why we don’t hear our own accent’s phonetic features. Her other research interests include sociophonetic methodology, sound symbolism in given names and the effects of individual differences on speech perception.
Contact info: lisasullivan@cunet.carleton.ca
Benjamin Crawford
Student
Benjamin Crawford completed a Bachelor of Arts Honours in Linguistics at Carleton University. He completed independent study courses during his time in the BA program and had the opportunity to work on a research project under the supervision of Dr. Beth MacLeod on Centralization of Unstressed Vowels in Mexican Spanish. That work was co-presented with Dr. MacLeod at the Canadian Linguistic Association (CLA) annual conference held in Ottawa in June, 2024.
Benjamin is continuing at Carleton University in the MA program, studying Emphatic Spread in Arabic dialects, with a focus on language acquisition and phonetic imitation. Additional interests include Semitic languages, and autism research.
Contact info: benjamincrawford@cmail.carleton.ca
Sophia Sedigh Afshar
Student
I hold an MA in Linguistics from Carleton University, where I am also pursuing my PhD in Linguistics. My primary area of research is phonetics, with a particular interest in phonetic imitation and second language acquisition. My current work investigates how the abstract phonological knowledge of a speaker’s first language influences their ability to imitate phonetic features in a second language. This research contributes to a better understanding of L2 acquisition by exploring this interaction between phonological representation and phonetic production.
Contact info: sophiasedighafshar@cunet.carleton.ca
Erik Morris
Student
Erik started in the arts as an illustrator, spending his days covered in pencil shavings, eraser dust, and ink. Later he came into dance, something no one who knows him expected, where he spent the next decade performing, competing, and teaching Lindy Hop (a dance with roots in the African-American culture of 1930s Harlem, NYC). Through all of this and now into linguistics and academia, two things have always stayed constant: a curiosity and drive to learn, and a love for sharing his passion and teaching others. Erik has always been drawn to linguistics in some way, and it wasn’t until a chance encounter at a dance event that the name for it was finally introduced to him. From learning languages (current attempted language count: 9), to studying the history of languages, their evolution, and the cultures that shaped them, he has ever been dancing around the edges of the linguistic field. Erik graduated in 2023 from Carleton University with an Honours degree in Linguistics and a minor in German, where he first became interested in L2 acquisition and Modern Greek phonetics. This interest in phonetics and phonology brought him to Université Paris Cité where he graduated in 2024 with an MA in phonetics and phonology after further exploring dialect exposure in L2 acquisition with Modern Greek dialects.
Research Interests:
- Speech perception and production
- Second language acquisition
- Phonetic imitation (convergence, accommodation)
- Dialectology
Contact info: erikmorris@cmail.carleton.ca | erik.morris@etu.u-paris.fr | emorris@smail.uni-koeln.de
Kamala Muthukumarasamy
Student
My research looks at how social and acoustic factors affect the perception and production of different sound contrasts in heritage speakers. I am interested in the role that perceptual salience plays in heritage language acquisition, development, maintenance, retention, and transmission. My previous work has looked at heritage Tamil and Czech children, and my current work focuses on adult heritage Tamil speakers.
Contact info: kamala.muthukumarasamy@carleton.ca
Liam McGunnigle
Student
I’m Liam, a third year PhD student in Linguistics at Carleton University. I completed a BA in Linguistics from Queen’s University in 2022 and an MA in Linguistics from York University in 2023. My Master’s MRP investigated language attitudes towards different Italian speakers through a matched guise test. I’m currently working on my QP at Carleton which focuses on acoustic variation amongst heritage speakers of Italian in Canada as it pertains to voice onset time (VOT). My research interests include sociophonetics, speech perception, language attitudes and ideologies, sociolinguistic variation and change, and language revitalization.
Contact info: liammcgunnigle@cmail.carleton.ca
Michelle Huang
Student
I am a current MA student here at Carleton University working on my thesis titled “Everybody Talks: Exploring Phonetic Imitation in a Non-Social Setting”. I am interested in seeing if there is a difference in the degree to which people imitate when exposed to an audio recording versus an audiovisual recording considering the added visual information in an audiovisual recording. As more of the world moves online and we are exposed to increasing amounts of audio and audiovisual recordings on a daily basis, the question arises of whether or not being exposed to these recordings has an effect on how we speak. Accordingly, it is worthwhile to see how the online world may have an influence on the offline world.
Beyond my thesis, I am generally interested in language variation and change, language and media, as well as language and gender.
Contact Info: michellehuang4@cmail.carleton.ca
Emily Fitzpatrick
Student
Emily is in the fifth (and final!) year of her undergraduate degree, a double major in linguistics and anthropology. She finds anthropology to be fun and intriguing, but linguistics is her academic passion. Emily’s linguistic interests lie in phonetic imitation and imitation in general. Emily hopes to be able to expand her list of linguistic interests through an MA degree after she is done with her Bachelor’s.
Philippe Aigner-Therrien
Student
I am a second-year PhD student in linguistics, currently focusing on variation and phonetics of Canadian French spoken in Quebec. I am particularly interested in descriptive work, investigating pronunciation patterns and cross-dialectal variation. Specific examples of my interest include Quebec French Laxing spreading, where certain vowel qualities may spread to other vowels of a word, and the potential effect that Laurentian French has had on the pronunciation of coronal stops in Acadian French dialects spoken in Quebec.
Contact info: PhilippeAignerTherri@cmail.carleton.ca
Tayden Bourguignon
Student
I completed my BA in Linguistics with a Concentration in Psycholinguistics and Communication Differences at Carleton University, where I was awarded Carleton University’s Chancellor’s medal for outstanding academic achievement. During this degree, I volunteered as a research assistant on Dr. Tamara Sorenson Duncan’s ‘Many Teachers’ project, which examined how parental and sibling input influences children’s second language acquisition in families from immigrant and refugee backgrounds. I completed my thesis as part of this project, which explored variation in immigrant and refugee parents’ narrative elaboration styles during joint parent-child storytelling. I had the opportunity to present this work at the Multidisciplinary Approaches in Language Policy and Planning conference in June of 2024. Currently, I am completing my MA in Linguistics at Carleton University. As part of the Experimental Linguistic Research Hub, under the supervision of Dr. Beth MacLeod and Dr. Tamara Sorenson Duncan, my master’s thesis investigates how autistic people use prosodic cues (e.g., pitch, loudness, speech rate) to signal affective information (i.e., emotions, intentions). My thesis also explores variation in how this affective information is understood by autistic and allistic (i.e., non-autistic) individuals from a neurodiversity perspective.
Contact info: taydenbourguignon@cmail.carleton.ca