My Dissertation
My dissertation, tentatively titled The Acquisition of Ungrammaticality: Learning a Subset in L2 Phonotactics, investigates to what extent second language learners of English and Spanish are able to acquire a subset in their phonological grammar. I'm investigating this using some off-line judgment tasks, such as wordlikeness ratings, and also with some tasks that look more at the processing end, such as word-spotting.
Additional experimentation
In addition to my dissertation work, I've participated in a number of experimental projects in phonology and phonetics:
- Anteriority Assimilation Eric Bakovic and I worked on a static palatography study which confirmed that coronal stops differ in place of articulation when following [+/-anterior] obstruents.
- Stop epenthesis I worked with Amalia Arvaniti and the rest of the UCSD Phonetics Lab crew on a long-term ongoing project that determines if speakers of American English produce and perceive epenthetic stops between nasals and sonorants (does 'tense' sound like 'tents'?).
- Intrusive vowels in Santa Cruz, Bolivia with Katie McGee and James Kirby, I investigated what factors may predict the presence of an intrusive vowel in this particular variety of Spanish (when is 'gringa' pronounced like 'geringa'?)
- Bilingual VOT values in El Paso, Texas For my Master's thesis at UT El Paso, I examined VOT values in monolingual and bilingual speakers of Spanish and English, showing that while the bilinguals made a clear distinction between Spanish and English VOT values, both their English and Spanish values differed significantly from those of monolingual speakers of these languages (why does 'kerry' sound like 'gary' when my Mexican friends say it?)
...and theoretical analysis
Linguistic theory is the basis for solid experimental work, and I've also worked on theoretical analyses of a number of different phenomena:
- Double modals in Southern US English What do Southerners really mean when they say something like "I might could do that"? In my first comps paper, I undertook a description and analysis of the instances in which double modals are acceptable in (my variety of) Texas English.
- Vowel Harmony in Turkana My second comps paper looked at vowel harmony in the Nilotic language Turkana, offering an analysis under a modified version of McCarthy's theory of headed spans.
- Optionality in Spanish clitic placement Spanish clitics are generally thought to be interchangeable in placement, so that 'Te quiero ver' is in most instances equally acceptable to 'quiero verte'. In this paper, i present an Optimality Theoretic analysis of how this optionality can arise.
- Reduplication in child language With Jessica Barlow and Sarah Cragg of SDSU's Phonological Typologies Lab, I analyzed the data of a child whose reduplication patterns differ markedly from those typically described in most child language acquisition work.