Biography

Hi! I’m Casey, a Senior Linguist in the AI Specialists team at Appen. I work on a wide variety of projects and programs dedicated to improving AI for Good, and making language and speech technology accessible for all.

I’m also a researcher of Australian English sociophonetics. My research interests include children’s acquisition and use of sociophonetic cues, particularly in Australian English, and stress-meter relationships in music and language. My PhD research was completed at La Trobe University in 2019, and investigated gender-specific sociophonetic cues in primary school-aged speakers of Australian English.

The majority of my research work has been in sociophonetics, but I have been involved in a number of research projects at The University of Melbourne and La Trobe University over the years.

At La Trobe, I’m collaborating with Dr Cara Penry Williams (University of Derby) on an investigation of /t/ variation in the speech of children and young adults in Australian English. I have also worked on sociolinguistic variation in Melbourne English with Cara Penry Williams and Professor James Walker.

At The University of Melbourne, I worked with Dr Chloé Diskin-Holdaway and Dr Debbie Loakes on a project that looks at vowels in Irish English. I also worked with Professor John Hajek looking at phonetics and phonology in a variety of languages, including Saliba Logea (a native language in Papua New Guinea), Italian, and Sicilian. I also helped out with archiving language documentation data for Associate Professor Nick Thieberger on the Paradisec language archive.