About Sreeparna Sarkar

Faculty

Faculty Website: Sreeparna Sarkar's website

Research Interest: Sreeparna Sarkar's research interest (video)

MIC Related Research

Sreeparna’s interests lie primarily in speech production and speech perception research. Her research focus has been on linguistically understudied and less-commonly taught South Asian languages such as Hindi and Bengali, with interests expanding further to other related South Asian languages. She investigates phonological issues using experimental techniques and real data collected from human subjects.

She has contributed to several cross-linguistic studies investigating prosodic patterns in different languages such as Bengali, Quechua, English as a part of the Prosodic Typologies Lab led by Prof. Irene Vogel, at the University of Delaware which has investigated over 20 languages from across the world. She has also contributed to speech rhythm studies led by Dr. Kathryn Franich at Harvard University. This study investigated speech rhythm patterns of English and Medumba. Some of her recent works include an investigation of the effects of stress and focus as prosodic prominence phenomena and markedness on the perceptual accuracy of Bengali stops. The results of this study indicate that stress and markedness have a significant effect on the perception of the stops by native language speakers. She plans to extend this research to speakers of heritage speakers of this language. Her other research is in the area of articulatory phonology where she has investigated the phonetic manifestations of stop geminates with the electromagnetic articulographer. This study compared two competing theories, the Distinctive Feature Theory and the Articulatory Phonology theory, to check which better captures the manifestations geminates in Bengali.

Currently she is investigating topics related to differences in perception of stops from different but related languages and whether the knowledge of one translates to another in language learning.