Research

This project focuses on probabilistic vowel alternation patterns between perfective (CVCVC) and imperfective (-CCVC) verbs, e.g. [katab]~[-ktib], [fihim]~[-fham]. Through a lexicon study, I found that while there is partial predictability in both directions, predicting the perfective vowel relies more on the imperfective vowel, while predicting the imperfective vowel relies more on root consonants. These consonant effects are curiously absent in the perfective form despite the surface similarity of the two forms. Subsequently, I conducted a wug experiment and found that Egyptian Arabic speakers selectively generalize the statistical patterns in the lexicon in ways that are constrained by the morphosyntactic structure of the paradigm. 

You can read my manuscript on the project here. Comments are welcome!

Sequences of [t] followed by a sibilant in Hebrew are overall underattested yet only actively repaired via metathesis in very specific morphological environments. We are interested in the role of morphology in constraining the well-formedness of such sequences and the application of the metathesis process in Hebrew speakers' grammars. 

We presented the results of a phonotactics judgement study at MFM (slides), and we are currently investigating how speakers behave in a wug test where they are required to do morphological alternations. 

We are using a variety of methods (including meta-analysis, corpus study, and AGL experiments) to investigate the acquisition of non-concatenative morphology, which is abundant in the input of children learning Semitic languages but which consists of relating non-adjacent segments. Non-local phonotactic dependencies have been shown to be acquired rather late in languages with little to no non-concatenative morphology. 

As a first step, we are doing a meta-analysis of priming studies to identify the status of non-concatenative morphology in the adult grammar. Preliminary results suggest that both root and template priming are robust across Semitic languages and demonstrate morphological priming effects that are independent from phonological and semantic effects.  

I'm conducting fieldwork on the dialect of K'iche' spoken in Cantel, Guatemala. This dialect features frequent deletion of stressless vowels. One topic of investigation is the opaque interaction of syncope with possessive allomorphy. The rich verbal morphology of the language also provides good testing grounds for how syncope is constrained by morphological structure. 

In a previous nonce word experiment on English stress, Moore-Cantwell (in progress) found that participants' behavior differed significantly when they are also being asked to do an additional memory task.  This increase in working memory load causes participants to sometimes assign one stress pattern for all stimuli and display no sensitivity to certain statistical trends. These results indicate that additional cognitive load affects access to the phonological grammar. By modeling participants' behavior under load, we hope to offer a preliminary algorithmic level application of constraint-based phonological grammars.