Assistant Professor / Graduate Faculty
Ph.D. (in Linguistics) 2013, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Fields of interest:
Mary currently works on several research endeavors including the the Frank Porter Graham Project and the Southeast Raleigh Project. Through her research she hopes to create a better understanding of how children's accents change during the school years, and how cultural geographic factors interface with trajectories of language change. The broad goal of this type of research is to provide insight into the intersection of language and society in order to understand how and why language changes over time. A more immediate goal for such research is to increase understanding of language diversity, which will hopefully assist educators, speech pathologists, and test designers in creating equitable learning environments, interventions, and assessment tools. Mary's research has recently appeared in several journals including American Speech, Language Variation and Change, and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. She is currently working on a monograph of language variation across the lifespan.