about me

I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex, working primarily at the intersection of phonetics, psycholinguistics, and computing, but also addressing questions in morphology, historical linguistics, and Germanic (thanks Aditi!). My research covers a variety of languages and language families, but my main focus is on the South Asian region. This work began during my Masters at EFLU in Hyderabad, and continues through active collaborations with researchers at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, IIT in Guwahati, and the North-Eastern Hill University in Shillong. More specifics on these research areas can be found below, as well as on my research page and at the Speech Systems Lab site. If you would like to work with me at Essex or collaborate on research please email me.

current teaching

• LG364: Forensic Linguistics (Spring Term, 2025)
• This is a jointly taught module. I direct it and teach 3 lectures, but 4 other faculty teach on the module.


• LG365: Language and Computing (Spring Term, 2025)


• LG404: Graduate Phonology (Spring Term, 2025)

research areas

• Phonetics/Phonology
  speech acoustics, production, perception, organization of phonetic and phonological systems, lexical contrast structure, models of coarticulation, phonetics of South Asian languages (incl. Malayalam, Telugu, Assamese, Garo, and Phom)


• Morphology
  morphological processing in the brain, asymmetries in derivation, morpho-phonological alternations in derivation, historical changes in morphological structure


• Psycholinguistics
  cue weighting, perception in noise, word recognition, priming, eye tracking


• Neurolinguistics
  lexical access and morphological processing in the brain, phonological encoding of speech


• The Lexicon
  modeling acoustic cue distributions among lexical contrasts, acoustic cues to higher-order structure, lexical encoding, information structure in the lexicon


• Computing
  physiologically grounded automatic speech recognition, building resources for underdocumented languages (particularly of Northeast India), structured open-access lexical databases, modeling opacity in orthographic systems


• Complex Systems
  language as a complex system, simulating acoustic perturbation of lexical contrasts, phonological and semantic networks, methods in statistical inference on network data structures