About

I am an Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences and Cognitive Science at Villanova University’s Cabrini Campus and Director of the Language Use and Variation Lab. My research examines language variation and change, bilingualism, and the cognitive mechanisms of speech adaptation. I use acoustic analysis, neurophysiological measures, and quantitative and computational methods to study how people perceive and produce linguistic variation.

I collaborate across linguistics, cognitive science, and language technology, and I mentor students in research and professional development. Prior to academia, I worked on natural language understanding and localization at Amazon (Alexa and Prime Video), which continues to inform my interdisciplinary work.

I welcome collaborations that advance rigorous, socially grounded language science.

Research Interests

• Language variation and change
• Bilingualism and the perception-production link
• Language adaptation and alignment
• Quantitative and computational methods for language data
• Language technology in social context

Recent Research

• Beyond the null: Calibration, balance, and the interpretation of Pillai scores — 2026 preprint; manuscript under review at The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
• Estimand or estimator? Comparing vowel overlap measures against a known ground truth — 2026 preprint; revisions submitted to The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
• Time-resolved associations among theta phase synchrony, power, and ERP amplitude in speech-sound change detection — 2026 preprint with Jake Caselli and Joseph C. Toscano.

Publications, teaching, and full CV

Recent Academic Projects

• Experiential and neurocognitive mechanisms of language adaptation
• Language Variation and Change in Puerto Rican Philadelphia
• Phonetic Alignment in English as a lingua franca
• EEG Corpus Phrase Search and Connectivity Metrics

Research Software

• eeg-pipeline: A modular EEG pipeline in Python for ERP and time-frequency analyses in cognitive neuroscience
• phontrast: An R package for information-theoretic metrics of phonological category overlap
• APA format checker: Software for checking APA formatting
• lingviz.com: A suite of interactive tools intended to provide clear, visually engaging interfaces for exploring category structure, overlap, acoustic cues, and related questions in speech and language sciences