Projects

field work

Sardinia

In February of 2021 Simone Pisano and I traveled Genoni, a village in the Province of South Sardinia, on the high plane of Gesturi in Sardinia, to conduct interviews with speakers of the local variety of Sardinian, known as a Campidanese. Our goal was to confirm reports in the literature concerning an interesting pattern of intervocalic lenition, and to build a network of linguistic informants for potential future work using EEG.

That work resulted in a corpus of spoken Sardinian concerning local life, traditions, stories, and personal accounts. Happily, we also confirmed the productivity of the pattern of lenition. I also took pictures.

theoretical work

My theoretical work treats the nature of phonological knowledge--a property of human minds.

I work generally within the research program known as Substance-free Phonology, which gives ontological precedence to sound patterns over instrumental measurements or phonetic phenomena.

I have treated questions concerning the basic nature of featural representations, the mapping between phonology and phonetics, computational processes like lenition and fortition, and the interaction between vocabulary at different levels of description in a grammar. My work has been published in the journals Phonology, Glossa, and The Canadian Journal of Linguistics, in addition to various book chapters and invited discussion.

Current projects include work on a morpho-phonological puzzle in Gujarati infixation with Anna Grabovac and Mal Shah and a diatopic overview of so-called "final features" in Numic languages with Shanti Ulfsbjorninn.

cognitive neuroscience

Integrated versus independent processing of auditory features in speech sounds

With Bill Idsardi, Phil Monahan, and Ellen Lau

My post-doctoral work was an investigation of integrated versus independent processing of complex auditory information in the domain of speech and language. The central question is the following: can language-specific properties drive a shift from independent to integrated perceptual processing? Across different languages, speech sounds may form complete or incomplete cross-classifications. The project developed a methodological approach in which independent processing of multiple auditory cues are distinguished from integrated processing through the identification of distinct neural evoked responses (ERPs) elicited by speech-sound stimuli. The hypothesis was that whether the multiple cues of speech sounds are processed in an integrated or in an independent fashion is determined by language-specific experience. Specifically, we predict that complete classifications lead to independent processing of speech properties, whereas incomplete classifications lead to integrated processing.

bee cognition

A review of work on the minds of bees, which I use in undergraduate courses on cognitive science to illustrate computational/representational theories of mind.

Galarina marginata. Common name: Funeral Bells, a very apt name.

photos of poisonous mushrooms

Polyporus umbellatus, known as the umbrella polypore (one of my favorites to eat).

photos of edible (and other) mushrooms

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