I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Alberta (Assistant Professor 2016-2022). For the 2024 winter term, I am also the Director of Graduate Programs for the department.
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.
My recently completed project "Speech prosody of new vs. shared information in Canadian English", funded by an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), combines production studies, perception experiments and corpus annotation (with Jiseung Kim).
I am also very interested in prosodic typology and have investigated Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), Finnish, Yakut (with Lena Vasilyeva and Juhani Järvikivi), Mandarin and Inuktitut (in an ongoing collaboration with Richard Compton and Emily Elfner).
My new SSHRC Insight Grant project "Linguistic complexity in the marking of new information" will investigate interactions and trade-offs between prosody and morpho-syntax in marking information structure in English, Mandarin and Kalaallisut (in collaboration with Naja Blytmann Trondhjem).
You can find my published papers here.
Katie Schmirler's and my article on Plains Cree stress and phrase-level prosody was accepted for publication by the International Journal of American Linguistics in February. It is scheduled to appear in their January 2025 issue. In the meantime, you can find the final article draft on Research Gate and on OSF, where you can also find supplementary materials.
McGuire, Gwen, Smith, Kristin, Dailey-O'Cain, Jennifer, & Arnhold, Anja (2024). Crosslinguistic transfer of alignment patterns: The timing of prenuclear rising accents in English-German bilinguals. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 522-526). [published paper (open access)]
Kim, Jiseung & Anja Arnhold (2024). Phonetic and phonological aspects of prosodic focus marking in Canadian English. Laboratory Phonology 15(1), 1–38. doi: 10.16995/labphon.9316 [published paper (open access)]
Hert, Regina, Anja Arnhold & Juhani Järvikivi (2024). Focus effect unveils children's local processing of pronouns and reflexives. Language Acquisition, 1–27. doi: 10.1080/10489223.2024.2339837 [published paper]
Hert, Regina, Juhani Järvikivi & Anja Arnhold (2024). The importance of linguistic factors: He likes subject referents. Cognitive Science 48, e13436. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13436 [published paper (open access)]
Bao, Wenfu, Anja Arnhold & Juhani Järvikivi (2024). Phonology, homophony, and eyes-closed rest in Mandarin novel word learning: An eye-tracking study in adult native and non-native speakers. Applied Psycholinguistics, 1–30. doi: 10.1017/S0142716424000031 [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!