Hi and welcome to my website.

I am a linguist and cognitive scientist working on speech. I currently work as a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (Postdoctoral Scientific Staff Member) with the Spoken Language Processing Group and the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing at LMU Munich.

Speech is deceptively simple. We produce it effortlessly and infants acquire it without being explicitly taught. Yet it is one of the most complex activities performed by the human central nervous system, requiring the coordination of more than a hundred muscles with precision in the range of millimeters and tens of milliseconds.

I study the principles that make the production and perception of speech possible. What fascinates me is the tension between their universal character – grounded in the human body – and their language-specific instantiations – shaped by culture, history, and cognition. Understanding both the principles themselves and the variation they generate is the core of my empirical agenda, as no two speech acts are identical, no two dialects sound the same, and no two languages carve up the realm of sounds in exactly the same way. I am also increasingly interested in how pathological conditions affect these principles – and what their breakdown reveals about the mechanisms that make speech possible in the first place.

To understand the laws of speech, I draw on state-of-the-art tracking and imaging techniques, such as electromagnetic articulography and real-time MRI, combined with dynamical-systems and Bayesian modeling, as well as on advances in machine learning and AI. I apply these techniques to a typologically diverse range of languages – from Italian and French to Thai, Japanese, Malay, Icelandic, and beyond – and to diverse populations of speakers.

I see the pursuit of knowledge as a collective enterprise and am especially fond of collaborating with other researchers across phonetics, linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science.