My research encompasses both phonetics and phonology as I investigate sounds and melodies of human languages. Specifically, I focus on prosody, and use experimental techniques to disclose form-function mappings in tonal and intonational contours. Ever since I began exploring intonational variation from bilingual speakers of Creole languages, I have been doing fieldwork in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, with the bilingual Palenquero/Spanish speakers. I have taught Spanish at all levels, advanced Spanish grammar, and Spanish phonetics at the Univerisity of Massachusetts Amherst and other universities in United States, Spain, Colombia, and Trinidad and Tobago.

A second area of specialization is dialectology, wherein I’m trying to combine functional principal component analyses of intonation with spatial autocorrelation analyses.