I’m a phonologist who works on questions of linguistic theory using computational and experimental methods. I’m an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Southern California. Prior to this, I worked in the Computational Psycholinguistics Lab in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT, supervised by Roger Levy, and affiliated with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. I completed my PhD in 2021 under the supervision of Bruce Hayes in the Linguistics Department at UCLA.
My CV can be found here.
My research is in theoretical, computational, and experimental phonology, with particular interest in learning/acquisition, the representation of overlapping and interacting phonological processes, and phonology’s interfaces with (morpho)syntax and the lexicon.
- Output-based identity effects are cases where the phonological and lexical characteristics of non-local surface forms in a paradigm impact variable phonological phenomena. My dissertation focused on Lexical Conservatism in English and Mexican Spanish, and I also work on Paradigm Uniformity in Tōhoku Japanese in collaboration with Hiro Katsuda (UCLA) and Shigeto Kawahara (Keio U.): descriptive paper here, analysis of corpus data here.
- Constraint cumulativity is also the topic of a major line of research; see papers here (2020 in Phonology), here (resubmitted to Glossa, with Adam Albright – MIT), and here (2021 in Laboratory Phonology, with Shigeto Kawahara).
- Phonological influences on syntax are something I think a lot about; see here (published in Language, with Bruce Hayes – UCLA).
Methodologically, I make use of whatever tools are needed for the job: right now, this means computational modeling (Bayesian and otherwise), corpus methods, online surveys of understudied languages, and laboratory experiments of all types.
Feel free to get in touch: first initial last name æt usc dɑt edu.
News:
I gave a poster with Kinan Martin, Jon Gauthier, and Roger Levy at INTERSPEECH 2023 on August 21st called “Probing self-supervised speech models for phonetic and phonemic information: a case study in aspiration” [poster] [paper].