PhD in Linguistics

Computational Linguistics, Automated Speech Recognition, Language Documentation/Revitalization, Phonetics, Sociolinguistics (Gender and Neurodiversity)

Summer is a PhD student and Presidential Scholar in the GMU Linguistics department. With a background in data science, her research interests lie at the intersections of linguistics and computational methods. She takes particular interest in the documentation and revitalization of indigenous languages using computational tools. Summer is currently focused on community-centered speech technologies for low-resource and indigenous languages, and has done work on automated speech recognition models for Akuzipik (a native Alaskan language) and Hawrami (a low-resource Iranian language). Summer is also involved in research on autistic pragmatics and bias in AI-detection tools against content written by autistic adults.