Welcome!

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt in the Institute for Romance Languages and Literatures, and I hold a PhD in Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism from Rutgers University.

I am primarily interested in meta-scientific questions that relate to research in the acquisition of phonetics and phonology in late-learned languages. One of these questions is how much information is necessary to reliably characterize the production of a particular speech sound by an individual, and does this change depending upon whether a first, second or third language is being studied? In general, as a statistical distribution underlying a speech sound becomes more variable, more repetitions of the sound become necessary to reliably characterize it. My research program, as a result, focuses on how speech production can be reliably characterized and which factors predict its variability. Carring out primary studies, replications and simulations to tackle this question, I have found that an increase in repetitions and a less reliance on group model studies are necessary in L2 and L3 acquisition.