The Gerund attacks some peaceful pronounsRebecca S. Colavin
I was born in the UK but grew up near Paris. I have a European degree in nursing and have translated a number of texts from English to French in a variety of subjects, not all of which are particularly respectable. I obtained a BA in linguistics from SDSU and completed course work for the MA in computational linguistics from the same institution under the direction of Rob Malouf and Marc Gawron. I was accepted into the doctoral program at UCSD for fall 2005.
Research Interests
Current interests:
I am a member of a number of research interest groups; SaDPhiG, the phonology group (directed by Sharon Rose and Eric Bakovic), the psycho-linguistics lab (director Roger Levy), the Language Evolution Complex Sytems group (led by Alex Del Giudice) and the computational linguistics and discourse group (director Andy Kehler).
I am working on an extension of my second comps paper. This is, I believe, our department's first foray into computational phonology. In my second comps paper (under the direction of Eric Bakovic, Roger Levy and Sharon Rose), we tested a state-of-the-art computational model of phonotactic learning (Hayes and Wilson, 2008). I am now working on my qualifying paper (committee: Eric Bakovic, Chair; Sharon Rose, Roger Levy, Bruce Hayes, Gary Cottrell ). The goal is to produce a computational model of phonotactics that will allow us to directly evaluate both the role of frequency in the acquisition of a phonotactic grammar and the biases that modulate frequency (ie, when frequency cannot directly account for speaker judgments, what does?).
Previous work: My first comps paper (under the direction of Amalia Arvaniti) was an investigation of the production of epenthetic stops in sonorant/fricative clusters (that's when the word “prince” ends up sounding like “prints”). Subjects (Southern Californians) produced sentences in three different styles; casual speech, list style and forced contrast and we measured the length of the stop in two different ways; absolute length and the stop/word ratio. Our results showed that speakers reliably produced longer stops in words with a underlying stop (prints) than epenthetic (prince). Here is the abstract (pdf) and you can read the complete paper here (pdf). Be kind, it was my first paper!
Back burner: There are also a bunch of “I'll get to it sometime” projects. I have an abiding interest in statistical classifiers (in particular maxent models), and supervised learning. I would like to extend that experience by doing more unsupervised learning. I also have some experience with data-mining and I would welcome the opportunity to do more. More generally, I am interested in proto-roles, French back-slang, and object deletion in how-to genres. I may get around to doing something about these in the next century.
Courses
Fall 2005
211A: Introduction to phonology
2121A:
Introduction to grammatical theory
Winter 2006
211B:
Non-linear phonology
221B: Introduction to grammatical
theory
Spring 2006
210: Introduction to phonetics
265:
Topics in Linguistics (With Andy Kehler)
Fall 2006
296:
Directed research (with Andy Kehler)
296: Directed research
(with Amalia Arvaniti)
Teaching
I have extensive teaching and TA experience. At SDSU I taught Introduction to Linguistics. At UCSD, I have taught French in the LLP program and I have TAed undergraduate syntax, phonology, phonetics, morphology, Introduction to linguistics, Socio-linguistics and Languages of the Americas. Umm and maybe a couple that I have forgotten.