I was a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Sign, Gesture, and Language at the University of Chicago from 2014 to 2016. Previously, I worked as a research assistant in the Sign Language Linguistics Lab as well as the Chicago Language Modeling Lab. I have many research interests, particularly articulatory phonetics and phonology, morphology, and computational approaches to each. I have worked on a number of projects involving sign language phonetics and phonology, how perception and action influence gesture, and how gesture and sign languages interact.
Broadly speaking, I’m interested in how humans use their bodies to communicate both linguistically and non-linguistically. My primary focus is on how signers (people who use sign languages) use their body, arms, and hands in linguistic systems. How are the infinite number of possible configurations for a given articulator divided into meaningful groups (ie phonological units)? How much variation is allowed within these groups? What are the factors that contribute to this variation?
Since the fall of 2009, I’ve been working with a research group consisting of researchers who specialize in linguistics, speech and language processing, and computer vision, with the goal of developing automated sign language recognition tools. This collaboration fostered my interest in the phonetics of sign languages. I hope to continue to develop models and tools that contribute both to our knowledge of phonetics generally, and inform automatic recognizers of fingerspelling.
For a current list of my publications please see my publications.
American Sign Language (asl ) fingerspelling
Fingerspelling is used anywhere from 12 to 35 percent of the time in asl , (Padden and Gunsauls, 2003) and as such should not be set aside as extralinguistic. There has only been a small amount of information put together on the phonetics of fingerspelling. The only work on fingerspelling phonetics explicitly that I’ve found is (Wilcox 1992) as well as (Tyrone et al. 1999).
I’m especially interested in how contextual variation can be modeled based on linguistic (eg articulator activation, phonological features) as well as non-linguistic (eg physiological) factors. To test theories of this variation (as well as others about phonetics, phonology, and their interface), I study how signers produce asl fingerspelling. Studying fingerspelling provides opportunities to find contextual and time-conditioned variation in handshape that are relatively limited in signing. This work builds on phonological systems of sign language production, but with a detailed focus on the specific aspects that make up handshapes in asl .
My work continues to explore fingerspelling production. I am continuing to model handshape and temporal variation that was the focus of my dissertation. I’m also involved in projects that look at how native signers as well as second language learners perceive and comprehend fingerspelling, and especially what factors contribute to successful fingerspelling comprehension; in projects that look at how handshape similarity can be quantified and tested.
I use a variety of methods including annotated video data and instrumented capture to generate large, robust, quantitative sets of data. Similar methods have a (relatively) long tradition in spoken language linguistics, however they are only beginning to be used to look at signed languages. My work is supported in part by nsf 1251807.
Dissertation project
My dissertation (defended August, 2014) develops an articulatory phonology model (for more information, see the more detailed description below) linking the phonology and phonetics of handshapes in American Sign Language (asl ), which was validated against data on handshape variation. On top of handshape variation, my dissertation includes detailed analyses of temporal information of the fingerspelling of native asl signers.