teaching

Teaching Philosophy

What I hope every student learns from me, in the classroom or out, is the joy of discovery and the necessity of failure on the path to that discovery. I strive to build educational opportunities that provide structured access to knowledge and the encouragement for students to explore and synthesize that knowledge themselves. I want to engender a healthy distrust for the obvious while feeding or reviving an innate respect for the wondrous complexity that surrounds us. In practical terms this means things like curating assigned readings and providing support for them so that a curious reader can discover, for themselves, a coherent path. I provide assignments, and grading structure, that encourage play and the kind of low-stakes opportunities to experience informative failure and eventual success that are necessary for learning.

Mentorship & Advising

year	advisee	thesis	role
2025	Stella Takvoryan	Listening to cursive: The roles of regional identity and folk beliefs in perceptual cue-weighting	MA thesis chair
2025	Kaitlin Young	Cognate Facilitation and Processing in English-Speaking Learners of German	MA thesis co-chair with Brenna Byrd
2024	Emily Remirez	Modeling the Role of Social Information in Speech Perception	UC Berkeley PhD thesis, co-chair with Keith Johnson
2023	Nour Kayali	This Make Sense?” The Effect of Congruent Guise in Regional Accent on Grammatical Acceptability Judgments	MA thesis chair
2021	Jarred Brewster	Language Contact and Covert Prominence in the Sḥerēt-Jibbāli Language of Oman	MA thesis chair
2021	Monica Chulde Guayasamin	Face Masks and Speech Perception: Emotions and Intelligibility Perceived by Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers	MA thesis chair
2021	Kyler Laycock	The Influence of Socioindexical Information on the Speech Perception-Production Link Evidence from a Shadowing Task	MA thesis chair
2020	Ollie Combs	Relevant Angry Affect Slows Response Time To Commands	MA thesis chair
2019	Robert Bell	Limón Patwa: A Perceptual Study to Measure Language Attitudes Toward Speakers of Patwa in Costa Rica	MA thesis co-chair
2019	Andy M Gibson	Sociophonetics of popular music: insights from corpus analysis and speech perception experiments	External Examiner (not advisor)
2019	Mikhayla Sheeley	Linguistic Relativity and the L2 Learner: An Investigation of the Effects of L2 Grammatical Gender on L1 Conceptual Gender	Undergraduate honors thesis chair
2019	Jaycee Taylor	Lexingtopn STEAM Academy High School Internship	Supervisor
2018	Philip Barnett	A Markedly Different Approach: Investigating PIE Stops Using Modern Empirical Methods	MA thesis co-chair with Andrew Byrd
2018	June Nielsen	Lexingtopn STEAM Academy High School Internship	Supervisor
2017	Aidah Aljuran	“Listening with an Attitude” The Role of Attitude on Native and Non-Native Intergroup Communication	MA thesis chair
2017	Kelly E. Wright	The Reflection and Reification of Racialized Language in Popular Media	MA thesis chair
2016	Kaitlyn Lee	The Perception of Creaky Voice Does Speaker Gender Affect our Judgments?	MA thesis chair
2016	Jo Mackby	Cries from The Jungle: The Dialogic Linguistic Landscape of the Migrant and Refugee Camps in Calais, France	MA thesis co-chair with Mark Lauersdorf
2015	Ksenia Gnevsheva	Variation in passing for a native speaker: accentedness in second language speakers of English in production and perception	External Examiner (not advisor)
2014	John Galindo	A psychoacoustic study of the influence of L1 lexical tone and pitch perception	Rice University, Qualifying Paper, chair
2014	Penelope Howe	Investigation of cues to fricative voicing in dialects of Malagasy	Rice University, Qualifying Paper, chair
2013	Hussein Hizazi	Formant Analysis of Jordanian Arabic Vowels: Emphasis Effect on F2 in Jordanian Arabic	Rice University, Qualifying Paper, chair
2013	Ling Ma	Native Mandarin perception of English word boundary consonant overlap.	Rice University, Qualifying Paper, chair
2013	Mariama Mallah	Directed undergraduate research	Stanford University
2013	Obi Nwabueze	The use of eye-tracking in speech perception research	Undergraduate Research
2013	Sheri-Ann Peckham	Investigation of age-related perceptual plasticity using Jamaican Creole	Undergraduate Research