Research, Presentations, Clubs and more!
Conference Presentations
Some images of me presenting at T-CoL, Discover Day (2025), and ASA respectively:
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- 2026 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Convention Virtual · November 2026 Presentation: The Effect of Dialectal Variation in Listeners' Perception of English Interdental Fricatives and Liquids
- XXI Congreso de la Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de América Latina (ALFAL) Lima, Peru · August 2026 Presentation: Una investigación variacionista de la intensificación en el español colombiano
- 13th Annual LSU Discover Day Undergraduate Research & Creativity Conference Baton Rouge, LA · April 2026 Presentation: Tracking a Linguistic Innovation: A Sociolinguistic Investigation of Intensifiers in Three Spanish-speaking Communities
- Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) Atlanta, GA · March 2026 Presentation: A Variationist Study of Spanish Intensifiers
- Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meeting New Orleans, LA · January 2026 Presentation: Tracking a Linguistic Innovation: A Sociolinguistic Investigation of Intensifiers in Three Spanish-speaking Communities
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- 188th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) / 25th International Congress on Acoustics New Orleans, LA · May 2025 Presentation: Effect of dialectal variation on listeners' perception of English interdental fricatives and lateral liquid sounds
- 12th Annual LSU Discover Day Undergraduate Research & Creativity Conference Baton Rouge, LA · April 2025 Presentation: A Sociolinguistic Study of Intensification in the Spanish of Louisianian Puerto Ricans
- Fifth Annual Emory Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (EULC5) Virtual · April 2025 Presentation: A Variationist Analysis of Intensification in Spanish
- Seventh Annual Tulane Conference on Linguistics (T-CoL) New Orleans, LA · March 2025 Presentation: A Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish Intensifiers across Two Dialects
- Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders Roundtable, LSU Baton Rouge, LA · 2025 Presentation: Effect of dialectal variation on listeners' perception of English interdental fricatives and lateral liquid sounds
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- Summer Undergraduate Research Forum, LSU Baton Rouge, LA · August 2024 Presentation: A Sociolinguistic Study of Intensification in the Spanish of Louisianian Puerto Ricans
Research at LSU
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A Variationist Study of Spanish Intensifiers
A multivariate study of 7,835 intensifier tokens across Medellín, Tunja (Colombia), and Louisiana Puerto Rican Spanish, examining how gender, age, education, and adjective type condition intensifier choice. I developed a custom Python corpus pipeline to extract and classify tokens from sociolinguistic interview transcripts. Findings show periphrastic intensification dominates, and súper is an ongoing innovation led by young women of higher socioeconomic status. Published in the Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 11(1). doi:10.3765/plsa.v11i1.6091
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The Effect of Sociophonetic Variation on Listeners' Perception of English Interdental Fricatives
Investigated whether stereotypical associations between interdental fricative variation (stopping and labialization) and talker race influence listener perception of ethnolect (AAE vs. Southern White English) across 108 listeners. I categorized stimuli, built the Qualtrics survey, and contributed to Praat acoustic analysis. Results show listeners use socio-ethnic stereotypes in speech perception, with word-final labialization serving as a stronger marker of sounding Black than word-initial stopping. Manuscript submitted to the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research; currently under review.
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Honors Thesis: Phonological Feature Retention in Distilled Speech Models
Full-size self-supervised speech models encode phonological features as linear structure, so that the vector for [b] can be recovered from [d] − [t] + [p]. The models that actually get deployed are distilled down to a fraction of that size, and nobody has checked whether that structure survives being compressed. I am building a pipeline that pulls per-layer hidden states out of both the teacher models and their distilled students, pools them by phone using forced-aligned boundaries, and scores every phonological contrast separately, so I can see which features break down first.
Clubs & Academic Organizations at LSU
- Event Coordinator, Arabic Language Club
- Vice-President, Student Linguistics Association
- Historian, French Club (Le Cercle Français)
- President, Student Linguistics Association
- Vice-President, Creole Club (Organizasyon Langaj é Lakilchi Kréyol Lalwizyàn)
Awards
- Hispanic Scholarship Fund
- Baker Hughes Endowed Scholarship
- Adrian Virginia Lazarus Memorial Scholarship
- President's Honor Roll
- Honors TOPS Scholarship
- President's Student Aid
- Gulf Scholars Program