Hello! I’m Megh (she/her), a 6th year PhD candidate in linguistics, with a research specialization in phonetics and computational linguistics. My dissertation research investigates 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!

I am currently 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.

Previously, I worked as a GRA in the ASIST-ToMCAT project’s Speech and NLP team, where I have 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