Shirley Mordechai 

(née Gabber)

I am a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and a recent Visiting Research Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, now based in Israel. I specialize in acoustic phonetics and the computational analysis of speech. My research applies acoustic measurement and Bayesian statistical modeling to endangered and understudied languages, with a current focus on Moroccan Judeo-Arabic.

My dissertation investigates three phonetic phenomena in Moroccan Judeo-Arabic: the influence of emphatic consonants on vowel formant trajectories, the spectral properties of merged sibilant consonants, and the phonetic realization of rhotics. I work with Praat and MATLAB for acoustic analysis and R for Bayesian statistical modeling, and have prior experience with Python and Java.

I co-authored a paper in the Annual Review of Linguistics on advances in technology for language documentation, and three papers from my dissertation are in preparation for journal submission. I recently presented at the 189th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (2025), with an accepted presentation forthcoming at LabPhon (2026).

I am a native English speaker with a high level of Hebrew, and my research sits at the intersection of phonetic fieldwork, quantitative analysis, and an emerging focus on speech and language technology.