ONGOING PROJECTS:

1. Methodological issues related to dialectal research and the search for ways to level the observer's paradox

Within this line of research,  I explore several data gathering methods and their consequences for the observations made and results obtained: fieldwork yielding spontaneous speech from semi-structured interviews, rigorous perception and production experiments, spontaneous productions produced without experimenter supervision based on specific instructions and without insructions via the social media. Here, I look at the influence of the experimenter and of the social setting on the nature of sounds produced and the relative naturalness of speaker productions.

I also explore methods of studying sound production from the articulatory perspective, with a special focus on low-cost, fieldwork-friendly recordings. Here, I include portable ultrasound recording, as well as motion capture implemented using internet camera recordings is considered in a series of experiments.

Projects involiving this research: joint work with Małgorzata Ćavar (University of Indiana), Peter A. Krause (CSUCI, SONATA project and Fulbright Senior Award), Joanna Zaleska (Humboldt University, under perparation).

2. Cognitive flexibility, cognitive load and interpreting quality as a function of age

SONATA BIS -- 4-year research grant awarded by the Polish National Science Centre for the project "Cognitive flexibility, cognitive load, and interpreting performance in simultaneous interpreters as a function of age". The aim of the project is to study how interpreters' abilities change as they get older, focusing on their cognitive flexibility, i.e. the capability of adapting to a change of task or problem difficulty. For this purpose, me and my team will test over 160 professional interpreters using eyetracking technology, AI and cognitive tests to find out: 1) How interpreters' brains react to different levels of difficulty in the source speech as they age; 2) How interpreters' ability to adapt and switch between languages changes as they age; 3) How interpreters' accuracy in their interpreting changes with age. The project starts at the end of November 2024. The amount of funding is PLN 1.93 million.

3.  Resyllabification in phonology, phonological acquisition and second language learning

The aim of this project is to compare the production of word-edge segments between three groups of speakers: native speakers of a resyllabifying language, non-native speakers of a resyllabifying language and native speakers of a non-resyllabifying language. As a result, we will be able to find out how actual productions correspond to theoretical concepts (such as syllable constituents and resyllabification itself).

COMPLETED PROJECTS:

1. Sociophonetic factors influencing dialectal language change: the Spanish of Gran Canaria

The aim of this project is to analyse consonantal changes in the Spanish of Gran Canaria. For this purpose, a large database of spontaneous speech produced by around 50 native speakers of different ages was gathered. The project combines sociolinguistics, phonetics, psycholinguistics and phonology, with a special emphasis on perception versus production. The project is funded by the Foundation of the University of Warsaw and by the National Science Centre (SONATA grant).

2. Influence of accented speech on language processing during simultaneous interpreting

The aim of this project is to use objective methods (eye-tracking, pupillometry) to measure the cognitive effort associated with foreign language processing during conference interpreting. Special attention is being paid to the foreign-accentedness of the language the interpreter listens to and tries to interpret into their native language. The foreign-accentedness will be determined based on the phonetics and phonology of the source and target languages, as well as of the native language of the speaker. Speakers will include Engish, Polish, Swedish and Chinese natives speaking English, and the interpreters will be Polish natives. It is hypothesised that the phonetic features of English spoken by Polish people will facilitate language processing while the features of a Chinese or a Swedish language whose phonetics and phonology differ from those of Polish will contribute to a higher cognitive load and hence greater difficulty in the process of interpreting.

3. Non-native sounds and stress perception (sociophonetic and psycholinguistic approaches)

General project encompassing "The perception of stress shift and vowel reduction by Spanish speakers". Preliminary results are to be extended by experiments on other languages (including Polish and German). Perception experiments conducted in 2015/2016 have been already published. The follow-up of the project was implemented at the University of Zurich as a part of a Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship (2017/2018).

4. Fricative lenition as an instance of sound change in progress (PhD project)

Here, I explored sociolinguistic and phonological approaches to fricative weakening in English (historically) and in Chilean Spanish. I conducted linguistic fieldwork on Chilean and analysed the data in Optimality Theory, looking at the standard model, as well as at a series of auxiliary mechanisms and modifications: output-output theories (including Transderivational Correspondence), sympathy, positional faithfulness, OT with candidate chains and Stratal OT. In particular, I looked at phrase-level phonology and prefixes, which show differences in surface representations with respect to morpheme and word-internal forms. As a result of this investigation, I published a volume entitled „Survival of the Fittest: Spanish and English Fricative Lenition from the Perspective of Optimality Theory”.