Hello! I’m Alexandra Pfiffner, a lecturer in linguistics at UC Berkeley. 

My research interests center on the interface between phonetics and phonology, in particular, understanding how acoustic and auditory cues can explain phonological patterns and sound change over time. I carry out speech production and perception experiments, use their results to develop theoretical models, and then computationally test the models. 

Recent news! 

1. My paper “Women of all ages lead tonogenesis in Afrikaans” has been published in the Journal of Germanic Linguistics! You can read it open access here.

2. Keith Johnson and I will be presenting our Voices of Oakland corpus at the upcoming meeting of the American Dialect Society.

3. Kai Schenck and I will be presenting joint work examining phonological inventories with PHOIBLE at the LSA.