Welcome
I am a phonetician interested in how linguistic experience shapes speech perception and production, with a focus on the domains of second language acquisition and sociolinguistic variation. I am currently an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Kansas. [ɹɑk̚ ʧʰɔk̚ ʤeɪhɔk̚]! I also serve as an associate editor at Second Language Research.
In the area of second language acquisition, I have worked primarily on the acquisition of segmental contrasts by learners of Korean. In my dissertation I investigated the perception and acquisition of the Korean sibilant fricative contrast by L1 speakers of Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. In more recent years, especially in collaboration with my students, I have been doing more research on the acquisition of the Korean three-way stop laryngeal contrast. Broadly, I am interested in the different factors that influence how learners learn to attend to and manipulate new acoustic cues (as in the aspiration in the sibilant fricative contrast), and also figure out how to use familiar cues in new ways (as in VOT and f0 in the three-way stop contrast).
My other main area of research is sociophonetics. I first became interested in Korean dialectal variation through my dissertation work, as it was repeatedly suggested to me that the sibilant fricative contrast is neutralized in Gyeongsang varieties. Since then, I have had the opportunity to work on dialect- and gender-based variation in the Korean stop and affricate contrasts, Korean dialect perception, sound change, and politeness.
Before coming to my Kansas, I worked for eight years in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Korea University, in Seoul. Before that I worked for three years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Second Language Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, where I was affiliated with the Second Language Psycholinguistics Lab, directed by Isabelle Darcy. And before that, I received my PhD in 2012 from the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University under the supervision of Mary Beckman.