My work stands at the boundary between Sociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics. I am primarily interested in Linguistic Variation, and in particular in how the brain processes phonological and morphological variants. Through experimental methods I explore how variation affects lexical access. This contributes to our knowledge of how we store and process pronunciation and morphological variants.
My work considers how the morphological variable ING (as in thinking versus thinkin’) is mentally represented. How are the suffix variants -ing and -in’ represented? Are they closely related and what can priming experiments tell us about this relationship?
Besides my work on variation I have running projects relating to how rhyme-prime or phonological priming works with regard to lexical access, methodological issues in auditory semantic priming, and obsolescence in the Welsh initial consonant mutation system.