A little about me?

 

Before I began my degree(s) at the University of Salzburg, I held teaching positions at Salzburg College (Austria) and two teaching/research assistantships at Bowling Green State University (Ohio, USA). I received my Bachelor's degree in German Studies, an individualized minor in Translation and Intermediality as well as a Master's degree in German Studies with a focus on variationist sociolinguistics and second language acquisition from Bowling Green State University. 

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For the better part of four years, my principal research areas have been variationist sociolinguistics and second language acquisition, especially in regard to quantitative approaches and statistical methods. My work investigates the acquisition, use and perception of variable linguistic features, structures and systems. In particular, I am highly interested in how native English speakers interact and deal with the rich variation present in Austria's linguistic landscape as well as which factors predict variable sociolinguistic competence in the naturalistic context. My goal with this research is to shed light on the dynamic interplay of cognitive, socioaffective and linguistic factors in the sociolinguistic development process and answer other outstanding questions, such as the extent to which different varieties of the same language (e.g. English) differently impact the sociolinguistic acquisition process in second language learners and how e.g. internal variability between individuals can highlight the (linguistic) nature of language contact outcomes. 

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I am also interested in other related fields, such as digital humanities and statistics. For my dissertation, I have developed an elicitation method using virtual reality that serves in part as a valuable substitute for sociolinguistic interviews and, more generally, proves to be an ecologically valid way to elicit realistic speech data. I am also very interested in a wide range of statistical modelling techniques, particularly within the Bayesian framework. In my dissertation, I take a multi-method approach, using Bayesian multilevel modelling to explore the impact of my set of predictors on sociolinguistic development, buttressed by qualitative content analyses as a means to explain meaningful statistical effects.