Fifth-year PhD student

Department of Linguistics, UMass Amherst

Research interests:

I study how exceptionful or probabilistic generalizations over linguistic objects are learned, and how they are represented in the adult linguistic system. I am especially interested in phonological patterns that exhibit variation across rather than within lexical items (for example, English stress). I am also interested in exploring how probabilistic generalizations are used in production and perception, and how and if they can be updated online.

I am also interested in prosodic structure, both at the level of the word, and of the sentence. I am particularly interested in the process of planning and implementing prosodic structure during sentence production. At the word level, I am interested in modeling prosodic structure in the framework of Harmonic Serialism.

In the Linguistics dept., I work with Joe Pater, and Lyn Frazier. I also spend time in the Phonetics Lab, working with John Kingston. In the Psychology dept., I work with Lisa Sanders in the Neuro-Cognition and Perception lab.

Projects:

2013. Syntactic Probability Influences Duration: Production of prosodic boundaries in clefted structures (Most recently:) Paper presented at the Workshop on explicit and implicit prosody in sentence processing, UMass Amherst. 30-31 May (Project page)

2013. __, Joe Pater, Robert Staubs, Benjamin Zobel and Lisa Sanders. ERP indices of lab-learned phonotactics. Talk presented April 6th at the Rutgers/UMass/MIT Phonology Workshop (RUMMIT), University of Massachusetts Amherst. (.pdf Slides)

2011. Bruce Hayes and __.Gerard Manley Hopkins's sprung rhythm: corpus study and stochatic grammar. Phonology 28:235–282. (Project page)

2011. Over- and Under-generalization in Derivational Morphology. Proceedings of NELS 42. (Project page)

2011. Contexts for Epenthesis in Harmonic Serialism. Paper presented at the 19th Manchester Phonology Meeting. (Project page)

2009. Gerard Manley Hopkins' Diacritics: a Corpus-Based Study. ms. UCLA  (PDF)

2008. Samoan Thematic Consonants and the -Cia suffix. ms. UCLA  (PDF)

    @ Tenaya Lake, new years 2012.
The tree is 1000+ years old and is fossilizing right there in the water!