Her research program explores basic mechanisms of speech production and perception in the context of changing demographics and regional variation in the United States. Her current projects aim to define the nature of the relationship between two sources of information in speech, linguistic and indexical. For example, she studies how older children, as they acquire linguistic knowledge, learn to produce and perceive the indexical properties of speech or how regional variation influences speech intelligibility. Other projects explore changes in speech behavior over human lifespan and speech patterns in individuals with speech-language disorders and developmental disabilities. She is also interested in the acquisition of sound structure of non-native languages.