Welcome!

I'm a phonologist who works on questions of linguistic theory using computational and experimental methods. I'm a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. I direct the Breiss Lab.

Prior to this, I was an Assistant Professor at USC Linguistics, and did my postdoc in the 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.

cbreiss@uchicago.edu · Google Scholar · CV · Breiss Lab

Research

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. I've become fond of calling this line of research "computational psychophonology".^*Also known as "psychocomputational phonology".

Methodologically, I make use of whatever tools are needed for the job: right now, this means computational modeling (Bayesian, neural, or otherwise), corpus methods, online surveys of understudied languages, and laboratory experiments of all types.

Teaching

I teach in the UChicago Linguistics Department.

In Fall 2026, I'll be teaching HUM17100: Language and the Human.

See my CV for a full teaching history.