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January 2026 – December 2026
I am a researcher at the Romanian Academy Institute of Linguistics, where I focus on phonetics and dialectology, and an external collaborator at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Letters. My work centers on understanding how people actually speak, exploring disfluencies, pauses, and nonverbal vocalisations.
Since completing my PhD in 2018 with highest distinction, I've been fortunate to lead several national projects focused on developing linguistic resources for Romanian, including the Ro-Phon spoken corpus, digital preservation of the National Phonogram Archive, as well as investigating hesitation in speech and pause typology. I am passionate about making phonetic research accessible, which is why I regularly teach experimental phonetics courses at UB and offer PRAAT training workshops for students and researchers.
Pauses, Boundaries, and Meaning: Inter-Pausal Units as Discourse Structuring Devices in Romanian Spontaneous Speech
Segmenting spontaneous speech presents significant challenges both for linguistic analysis and for automatic speech recognition systems. Unlike read speech, spontaneous speech is inherently disfluent, characterized by different pauses, non-verbal vocalizations, overlapping prosodic cues, and non-linear structures that complicate the identification of meaningful units.
The PBM project addresses this challenge by examining Inter-Pausal Units (IPUs), i.e., segments (e.g., cut-offs) or stretches of speech produced by a single speaker, delimited by pauses of various types (no temporal threshold employed). This project represents the first systematic investigation integrating phonetic, syntactic, and pragmatic perspectives to develop a functional typology of IPUs in Romanian monologue speech.
Methodologically, the project combines manual corpus reannotation in Praat with quantitative and qualitative analyses in R. Four hours of high-quality recordings from the Ro-Phon corpus are reannotated using a multi-tier schema reflecting pause structure, (dis)fluency patterns, syntactic alignment, and discourse functions such as planning, repair, topic management, and narrative progression.
Finally, the IPU typology is contextualized through cross-linguistic comparison with other Romance languages. By addressing a gap in Romanian spoken language research, the project contributes to theories of discourse segmentation, offers insights into speech planning mechanisms, and provides empirically grounded data with direct relevance for speech technology applications