AArvaniti

Personal

Bio

Amalia Arvaniti is currently an Associate Professor of Linguistics at UCSD and the director of the Phonetics Laboratory. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge and has held research and teaching appointments at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, the University of Edinburgh, King’s College London and the University of Cyprus. Prof. Arvaniti is one of the pioneers of Laboratory Phonology which which uses behavioral research to test the validity of linguistic models of grammar. Her research, which has been widely published and cited, has yielded crucial insights into the production, perception and linguistic structure of intonation. Her work on speech rhythm has challenged traditional views on the nature of rhythm and rhythmic typology. A large part of her research has contributed significantly to our knowledge on Greek phonetics and phonology and to several areas of Greek dialectology and sociolinguistic variation. Prof. Arvaniti’s research has been supported by grants from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the European Science Foundation and the Worldwide University Network, as well as University of Cyprus and UCSD intra-mural funds. She serves on the editorial board of Phonology and the Journal of Greek Linguistics and regularly reviews submissions for over 40 international journals in linguistics and cognitive science, book editors, funding agencies and conferences.

Amalia Arvaniti's main research investigates the production and perception of speech prosody, particularly of intonation, stress, rhythm and speech timing. Much of her research integrates Prof. Arvaniti’s interests in phonetics and phonology with her interest in language variation and change. The aim of her research is to construct empirically supported phonological models and to use experimental methods in order to answer questions pertaining to the structure of grammar and the nature of linguistic representations. As such, her research has repercussions for our understanding of language processing and acquisition. An ongoing research program seeks to explore the relative contribution of stress, rhythm, timing and speaking rate in speech production, processing and acquisition in a variety of languages with different rhythmic profiles (including Greek, Spanish, which are considered syllable-timed yet have stress with high functional load, and Korean, which does not have prosodic elements with a culminative function), using the cycling and entrainment protocols, as well as traditional behavioral tasks (such as the oddball paradigm, AX discrimination and phoneme detection) and computational classification. A second project starting in 2009-2010 extends her work on the phonetics and phonology of intonation to the investigation of the interactions between intonation, syntax and pragmatics.

 

URL

http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~arvaniti/