Koorosh Ariyaee

Hello! Welcome to my website!

I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. I am interested in phonetics, phonology, and psycholinguistics. Using experimental methods, I investigate the production, perception, and processing of words that exhibit variation in their sounds. In my dissertation I examine the lexical access and the mental representation of words’ variants whose variability is coded in the allophonic variation of the uvular phoneme in Spoken Persian. The goal of my dissertation is to understand how the underlying system of language cognition functions with respect to the processing and representation of phonetic detail observed in the pronunciation variants of words.

My research on sound variability and words’ variants extends to the domain of morphophonology. In a research on Persian, I am investigating vowel hiatus repair strategies at the stem-suffix boundary, resulting in variable word forms. In particular, I examine how different factors (suffix length, vowel quality, paradigmatic contrast) constrain the architecture of hiatus variability in Persian.

I am also interested in the phonetic documentation of underrepresented languages and dialects. I have been part of a research team working on the description and documentation of guttural sounds in Emirate Arabic, Iraqi Central (Sorani) Kurdish, and Lebanese Western Armenian. In this project, we have also been examining the reliability of online methods of acoustic data collection, with the goal of contributing to the methodological aspects of phonetic documentation of languages.