Hey there! I am Megh Krishnaswamy (she/her), currently working on a PhD in linguistics from the University of Arizona. As a phonetician, I work on the human speech system. Some of the projects I’ve worked on investigate the speech acquisition of L2 speakers, the role of pitch perception in the identification of sounds, and the acoustics of complex tongue gestures. I have also worked on the sound systems of Indic languages like Malayalam, Bangla, Hindi, and Assamese. I enjoy learning about internet linguistcs, encountering Englishes of the world; and composing short, fun language questionaires for my friends on social media.

I have two current research focii. The first is the analysis of phonemic contrast in languages with large phonemic inventories, especially among stops, to understand how languages systems maintain, store and access tight phonemic contrasts. I also look at the role of secondary acoustic cues and phenomena like neighbourhood density, in these processes. The second is the modelling of speech entrainment and phonetic accomodation, to find a relationship between convergence in speech patterns and cooperative relationships among speakers.

I am currently employed as a Graduate Research Assistant in the ASIST-ToMCAT project’s Speech and NLP team, where I work have assisted on work on multimodal . I have also worked as a Research Assistant in the Douglas Phonetics Lab, University of Arizona; and in the Splang Lab, The English and Foreign Languages University (Hyderabad), where I asisted in running experiments, creating auditory stimuli for forced choice and eye-tracking experiments, designing speech production experiments, and with data analysis and modelling.

I am a Teach for India aluminus, and have served low-income communities in Old City, Hyderabad as a full-time primary and middle school teacher. I am committed to making education accessible in the medium suited to the community, and language instruction that sees children as language scientists. With this aim, I have also worked on making educational content in Hindi more student-friendly and jargon-free during my internship at Karadi Path Education company. I also have experience facilitating school enrollments and with door-to-door information dissemination on childrens’ right to free education in India.

Conferences and Publications

1. Culnan, J., Park, S., Krishnaswamy, M., & Sharp, R. (2021, April). Me, myself, and ire: Effects of automatic transcription quality on emotion, sarcasm, and personality detection. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis (pp. 250-256).
2. Krishnaswamy, M., Dutta, I., & Bhaumik, M. (2020). Alveolar stops exhibit greater coarticulatory resistance than retroflexes and dentals in Malayalam. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 148(4), 2582-2582.
3. Dutta, I., Redmon, C., Krishnaswamy, M., Chandran, S., & Raj, N. (2019). Articulatory complexity and lexical contrast density in models of coronal coarticulation in Malayalam. In Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.
4. Krishnaswamy, M., Dutta, I., & Banerjee, U. (2018, May). Active cavity expansion through lingual adjustments to place of constriction in voiced geminates. In Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 175ASA (Vol. 33, No. 1, p. 060002). Acoustical Society of America.
5. Banerjee, U., Dutta, I., & Krishnaswamy, M. (2018). Evidence for active cavity expansion through advanced lingual place of constriction in voiced geminates. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 143(3), 1754-1754.

Education

1. PhD, Linguistics [Ongoing]: University of Arizona

   Areas of interest:

   • Speech perception
   • Speech production
   • Phonology
   • Computational linguistics

   Employment:

   • Graduate Research Assistant, ASIST-ToMCAT [Summer 2020 - present]
   • Graduate Research Assistant, Douglass Phonetics Lab [Spring 2020, Fall, 2020]
   • Graduate Teaching Assistant, LING-150 [Fall 2019]

2. MS Human Language Technology [2021]: University of Arizona

   Areas of interest:

   • Speech Technology
   • Corpus Linguistics
   • Natural Language Processing

3. MA Linguistics [2015]: The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad

   Areas of interest:

   • Psycholinguistics
   • Experimental methods
   • Acoustic phonetivs

4. BA English (Hons.) [2013]: Delhi University

Pedagogy and Advocacy

1. Teach for India fellowship [2015-2017]
2. Volunteer, Swechha [2012-2013]
3. Research intern, Karadi Path Education company [Summer 2014]