Research

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.