I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Alberta (Assistant Professor 2016-2022).
Previously, I was a postdoc at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, where I worked in the XPRAG.de project BiasQ: Bias in Polar Questions (PIs Maribel Romero and Bettina Braun).
I received my PhD from Goethe-University Frankfurt in 2013 and my MA from the University of Potsdam in 2007, both supervised by Caroline Féry.
I am an experimental phonologist working on prosody. My research looks at the role of intonation and phrasing in expressing pragmatic distinctions in discourse. A core area of my work is the prosodic marking of information structure and its interaction with other areas of grammar.
I am also very interested in prosodic typology and have investigated Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), Finnish, Sakha (also known as Yakut, with Lena Jones, née Vasilyeva, and Juhani Järvikivi), Mandarin and Inuktitut (in an ongoing collaboration with Richard Compton and Emily Elfner).
My curent SSHRC Insight Grant project "Linguistic complexity in the marking of new information" investigates interactions and trade-offs between prosody and morpho-syntax in marking information structure in English (with PhD student Yuting Sun), Mandarin (with PhD student Ziyan Zou) and Kalaallisut (with MA student Onu Didriksen at Ilisimatusarfik, in collaboration with Prof. Naja Blytmann Trondhjem). PhD student Saghar Javidpour researches these interactions for Persian.
I am also a co-editor at the Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique.
You can find my published papers here.
MA student Onu Didriksen visted us from Ilisimatusarfik in the 2025 spring term, supported by a Mitacs Globalink Research Award - for research in Canada for the project "Focus marking in Kalaallisut". The national Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq wrote an article about his visit (available in Kalaallisut and Danish, automatic translation to English from the Danish version works fairly well).
Alden, McKinley, & Anja Arnhold (2026). Quantitative evidence of complex metrical prosody in Chugach Alutiiq. Journal of Phonetics, 115, 101483. doi: 10.1016/j.wocn.2026.101483 [published paper (open access)]
I gave a general-public targeted talk on prosody for the Sound Studies Institute lecture series. You can see a recording of it here (on youtube). Thanks again to Scott Smallwood and Tom Merklinger for inviting and hosting me!