About My Research
Hello! I’m Megh (she/her). I am a linguist, with a specialisation in phonetics and computational linguistics. I am currently employed as a Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for Educational Data Science and Innovation (EDSI), Unviersity of Maryland (College Park); where my responsibilities include designing and leading research studies, providing language science expertise, facilitating peer learning, and investigating key issues in speech science applications in education technology.
My dissertation research investigated the linguistic aspects of vocal entrainment and phonetic accommodation, to find a relationship between convergence in speech patterns and cooperation among speakers in a team setting.
My research experience includes L2 speech acquisition, pitch perception and its effects on phonemic identification, and the acoustics of complex tongue gestures. I have worked on the sound systems of Indic languages such as Malayalam, Bangla, Hindi, and Assamese. Besides phonetics, I enjoy learning about internet linguistics, encountering Englishes of the world; and composing short, fun language questionnaires for my friends on social media!
Previously, I was employed as a Graduate Research Assistant at the U of A DataLab, where I facilitate and design workshops on NLP and ML topics, participate in technical consultations, and engage with my university’s data science community. As a GRA on the ASIST-ToMCAT project’s Speech and NLP team, I collaborated on projects related to multimodal modelling of human behaviour, assessment of the performance of ASR transcription services, and with the automatic collection of acoustic features for speech analysis. I have also worked as a GRA in the Douglas Phonetics Lab (University of Arizona) and Splang Lab (The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad), where I assisted in running experiments, creating auditory stimuli for forced choice and eye-tracking experiments, designing speech production experiments, and with data analysis and modelling.
Areas of Study
- Computational linguistics
- Speech Technology
- Speech perception and production
- Phonology of South Asian Languages
Research Interests
- Phonetic accommodation / vocal entrainment
- Automatic speech detection
- L2 speech acquisition
- Stop contrasts and the impact of articulatory and perceptual constraints