I am a postdoctoral fellow at the department of Linguistics in the University of Arizona, working on the phonology of Iranian languages. My main areas of research are poetic meter in Persian and other quantitative metrical traditions and intonation.

My research on Persian meters relies on the crucial observation that the Persian metrical system is highly productive. Participants who have been exposed to few meter families (less than 30) in their lifetime and may have encountered many of them only a couple of times can provide consistent metricality judgments on novel metrical forms. In my research, minimizing the effect of historical accidents and purely linguistic constraints, I shift the weight to musical intuitions, arguing that quantitative metrical traditions must be seen primarily as weight-assignments to universal rhythmic constraints that are independently motivated through studies on human rhythm perception.

My research on intonation mainly focuses on the interaction between stress and intonation. I am interested in how syntax (and to a lesser extent, semantics and pragmatics) interacts with nuclear stress assignment. I am also interested in the interaction between intonation and word stress, both in cases where stress contrasts are neutralized (in Persian and many related languages) in certain intonational contexts and more interestingly, cases where stress assignment patterns seems to be sensitive to the larger intonational context.