I am from the occupied Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, a descendant of coffee pickers from Hōnaunau plantation country, a heritage speaker of Hawaiʻi Creole (Pidgin), and an ongoing learner of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian). My work is driven by a commitment to addressing broader community-centered concerns and to producing scholarship that is accountable to the communities with whom I work.

My doctoral research examines the psycholinguistic connections between ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi and Pidgin, asking whether Pidgin speakers demonstrate advantages over English speakers in the development of an ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi proto-lexicon shaped by ambient linguistic exposure. This work brings together questions of speech perception, multilingual experience, and language revitalization, with implications for both theory, policy, and educational practice.

I am also the Principal Investigator of the Secwepemctsín Research Group Jacobs Research Fund grant. Our group investigates linguistic questions about Secwepemctsín through fieldwork with language speakers and works closely with community language teachers to translate this research into educational materials. Within this project, I am currently investigating the vowel and stress system of Secwepemctsín (Shuswap).

My broader research interests include speech production and perception, sociolinguistics, phonetics/phonology, multilingualism, second language acquisition, and language revitalization. I use a variety of methods to conduct research, including psycholinguistic experimental tasks, corpus linguistics, computational modeling, and fieldwork.

I am currently a sessional instructor at Simon Fraser University teaching LING 190 Introduction to Speech Sciences and LING 330 Phonetics. I design these courses to make technical material accessible while encouraging students to critically engage with speech science as both a scientific and socially situated practice.

As UBC Public Scholar, my work is largely public-facing. have been featured in media including Hawaiʻi Public Radio, the Moana Nui Podcast, and the Green College Resident Members’ Series. Please feel free to contact me if you want to learn more about the work I do or are interested in collaborating!

Grama, J., Kamigaki-Baron, M., Drager, K. (in press). Pidgin and English in Hawai’i. In R. Hickey and K. Burridge. New Cambridge History of the English Language Volume VI: English in Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Kamigaki-Baron, M., Soo, R., Babel, M. (in press). Bilingual speech and exemplar theory. In M. Amengual The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingual Phonetics and Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kamigaki-Baron, M. (2021). Acoustic Description of Secwepemctsín Vowels. The 56th Annual International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages (ICSNL56) [paper]

Nastevski, A.L, Yu, B., Liu, S., Kamigaki-Baron, M., De Boer, G., Gick, B. (2021). How do masks affect the way we speak? Canadian Linguistic Association (CLA). [paper]