The University of Massachusetts Amherst

Welcome!

See the menu for links to my linguistics work and other writing; my music can be found on a separate website.

I specialize in phonology (the sound systems of language) and the acquisition of phonology, and also have interests in broader aspects of cognitive science. My newest research is studying varieties of English, especially those spoken in Western Massachusetts. See the handouts/slides page for some initial results.

I’m Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I co-direct the UMass Computational Phonology lab with Michael BeckerGaja Jarosz and Kristine Yu.

I also like to help facilitate wider scholarly communication. In 2013 I founded the Annual Meeting on Phonology and its proceedings published by the LSA. In 2017 Gaja Jarosz and I founded the Society for Computation in Linguistics, which also has an open access proceedings. 

My research has been continuously funded by the NSF since 2008. The active grant is a collaboration with Gaja Jarosz, Brandon Prickett, and current UMass students entitled “Representing and learning stress: grammatical constraints and neural networks”.