I’m not active in Linguistics research anymore, but am always willing to chat. Feel free to reach out to my email address, which is located in the sidebar.
My bachelor thesis at Reed College focused on mental models of consonants between Shona (Zimbabwe) and English (America) speakers.
Shona has a strict Consonant-Vowel syllable structure, which leads speakers to interpret syllables as the smallest sound unit. In contrast, English syllables have more variety in the number of consonants which can preceed or follow the vowel. When presented with Shona words played in reverse, English monolinguals perceived consonant onsets as being comprised of smaller units which can be broken up and rearranged while Shona speakers treated onsets as units in their own right. That is, “chk” was perceived by English speakers as “ch” + “k”, but Shona speakers treated this sequence as “chk.”
In March of 2019, I had the opportunity to present at the conference Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL). My talk, Phonetic reduction effects in Malayalam, focused on consonant lenition and intonational boundaries. Malayalam is a language most commonly spoken in Kerala state in India.