Carina Ahrens

/ka‘ʁi:na ‘a:ʁəns/
(she/her)

Carina standing in front of a fantastic view of the city center of Edinburgh.

Here I am standing on Calton Hill enjoying the view on the city center of Edinburgh.

Welcome to my Academic Journey

I am a PhD student in the Linguistics Department at the University of Oregon where I work with Volya Kapatsinski, Rachel Weissler Powell and Kaori Idemaru. My research interests are (socio)phonetics as well as cognitive aspects of language. I am also interested in how people's speech changes over their lifespan and how languages interact and interfere in a multilingual speaker's mind.

I hold two bachelor’s degrees - a bilingual degree (Licence Franco-Allemande) in Musicology from Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen (Germany) and the University François Rabelais in Tours (France) and a two-subject degree in Anglophone Studies and History from the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany).

News & Events

Upcoming Presentations:

  • HISPhonCog 2026:
    22nd May - 23rd May 2026, Seoul (South Korea)
    Ahrens, C.: Vowel Variation Over T[ai]m: Comparing the First Person Possessive and the PRICE Vowel in Tyneside Englishi

  • ICLaVE 13:
    29th June - 2nd July 2026, Lausanne (Switzerland)
    Ahrens, C.: The Sp[i]ch of T[ai]ns[ai]d English: Can history explain the variation in the realization of the first person possessive my and the first person object me?

Current Research Projects:

  • Independent Project with James Grama:
    (dh)-stopping in Hawai'i Creole

  • Acoustic Realization of me and my:
    investigating acoustic properties of the object me and the first possessive pronoun my in Tyneside English

  • Cue Reweighting:
    Investigating whether and how participants reweight cues when their attention is directed to VOT or F0 to differenciate between beer and pier

  • Influence of Perceived Stereotypes in a Multilingual Environment:
    Investigating whether and how visually perceived stereotypes influence language perception/production of L1 French speakers living in Germany (producing/perceiving English)

Contact me here:

  • Email: cahrens[at]uoregon.edu
  • Email: carina-ahrens[at]web.de