I am a postdoctoral researcher at the English Language and Linguistics Department at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. My research interests include the interactions of gender and language, the semantics of genericity, discriminative learning, compounds, morphophonetics and phonetics more broadly, psycholinguistics, and sound symbolism.

My main research centres on two areas: the relationship between prosodic stress and semantic structure in English compounds, and the interplay between gender and language in shaping phonetic, semantic, and lexical representations. In my work on compounds, I investigate whether stress patterns can emerge through developing associations between form and meaning in a process of discriminative learning. This involves exploring how listeners and speakers might infer structural information from prosodic cues, and how such patterns are learned and generalised over time. My research on gender and language focuses on the ways in which gendered forms influence linguistic interpretation and representation. I examine, among other things, how masculine generics in German operate in practice – despite being labelled as gender-neutral – and whether the English singular they is genuinely processed as both singular and gender-neutral.

In addition to this, I also work on sound symbolism and the phonetic encoding of morphological information. One line of research investigates how perceptions of cuteness might influence size-related sound associations. Another focuses on subphonemic detail, especially the realisation of word-final /s/. My dissertation, completed as part of the DFG research unit Spoken Morphology, examined the production, perception, and comprehension of this segment in English. Published open access by Language Science Press, it led to three follow-up projects exploring the phonetic and morphological properties of word-final /s/ in both English and German.

Earlier research of mine has focused on tonal alignment and compensatory vowel shortening. Between 2017 and 2018, I also published several articles on the use of IT in logopedics.

If you’d like to know more, you can find my CV here. I also co-signed a statement by German and international linguists on gender-fair language in December 2020 and co-wrote a letter to the editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung reacting to an article on gender and language with significant flaws in April 2025.