As of September 2015, I am an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at University of Massachusetts Amherst. My research program is driven by a central question of cognitive science: what kind of system can explain the process by which children acquire the infinitely expressive and complex system of language from limited exposure to linguistic input? An overarching theme of my research is the development of formal systems that are informed by the insights and results of phonological theory and are also capable of successful and realistic modeling of phonological acquisition. My approach relies on computational modeling, grounded in probability and statistical learning theory, to develop models of phonological learning, to generate and test predictions of learning theories, and to analyze the relationship between the primary linguistic data and acquired phonological knowledge.
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Joe Pater and I recently organized the first meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, co-located with LSA 2018 and published with ACL anthology and ScholarWorks.
