Rachel Steindel Burdin’s research focuses on variation in intonation, particularly in Jewish languages and contact situations. Her dissertation, “Variation in the form and function of Jewish English intonation,” completed at The Ohio State University in summer 2016 and partially funded by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, examined variation in the production, perception and social meaning of Yiddish-influenced intonation. This research, and her work more broadly, makes use of a wide variety of techniques, including participant observation, acoustic analyses, perceptual experiments and media studies in order to get a fuller picture of the range and nature of variation in intonation. Her research also looks at intonational meaning more broadly, including work with her colleague Joseph Tyler on the interpretation of rising and plateau contours in listing contexts, and, with colleagues at Ohio State, on the prosodic marking of focus in different languages, with results published in articles in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience and Lingua. Her other research interests include the use of Yiddish in the construction of Jewish identities and places, particularly in areas with smaller Jewish populations, and Slavic/Yiddish contact.
