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My research interests center around the structure of the lexicon, and involve the application of psycholinguistic techniques to study lexical organization and processing. The languages that form the basis for this research are primarily Semitic languages, most notably Maltese and Modern Hebrew, and together with doctoral students I've also been involved in work on Amharic, Sana'ani Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Jordanian Arabic, and Khalka Mongolian. My recent NSF-funded research on Hebrew and Maltese tested the psycholinguistic reality of traditional elements of Semitic grammar such as the triconsonantal root and the word pattern. I use the auditory masked priming technique in order to investigate the extent to which language processing involves early and automatic parsing of these elements. In my lab, my students and I are also applying this methodology investigating English spoken word recognition to explore the parameters and limits of this technique. This work is connected with several collaborative corpus-building projects, in which I am building corpora and testing corpus representativeness as well as correlations between corpus measures and psycholinguistic behavior. Within formal linguistics, my principal area of interest is the intersection between phonology and morphology. My early training is in phonological theory, and within this domain, most of my work focused on prosodic morphology, or the interaction between word formation and prosodic restrictions.

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Courses
  • HP
    History of Phonology

  • FPTI
    Foundations of Phonological Theory I

  • PL
    Psychology of Language

  • CIHWWYALIEW
    Can I Have a Word With You? A Linguistic Introduction to English Words

  • AVWRLP
    Auditory and Visual Word Recognition and Lexical Processing

  • LT
    Linguistic Typology

  • M
    Morphology

  • PL
    Professionalism in Linguistics

  • TSMW
    The Structure and Meaning of Words

  • IL
    Introduction to Linguistics

  • TP
    Topics in Psycholinguistics

  • MLS
    Meaning in Language and Society

  • IP
    Introduction to Phonology

  • SMEL
    Structure of a Middle Eastern Language

Grants
  • Funding agency logo
    ToMCAT: Theory of Mind-based Cognitive Architecture for Teams

    Co-Investigator (COI)

    2019

    $5.0M
    Active
  • Funding agency logo
    Doctoral Dissertation Research: L1 Biases in Learning Root-and-Pattern Morphology

    Principal Investigator (PI)

    2017

    $6.9K
  • Funding agency logo
    SBE-RCUK: Experimental and Descriptive Investigations of Welsh (cym) Consonant Mutation

    Co-Investigator (COI)

    2015

    $362.4K
  • Funding agency logo
    Doctoral Dissertation Research: Morphological Decomposition in Arabic

    Principal Investigator (PI)

    2015

    $10.7K
  • Funding agency logo
    Experimental and descriptive Investigations of Gaidhlig (gla) Consonant Mutations

    Co-Investigator (COI)

    2012

    $300.2K
  • Funding agency logo
    Electronic Maltese-English Dictionary

    Principal Investigator (PI)

    2009

    $20.9K
  • Funding agency logo
    Psycholinguistic Investigation of Lexical Access in Hebrew and Maltese

    Principal Investigator (PI)

    2007

    $167.9K
News
  • Maltese-English Dictionary to be Digitized

    2010

Publications (52)
Recent
  • Learning a typologically unusual reduplication pattern: An artificial language learning study of base-dependent reduplication

    2022

  • At the Intersection of Cognitive Processes and Linguistic Diversity

    2022

  • Incremental word processing influences the evolution of phonotactic patterns

    2019

  • Crosslinguistic evidence for a strong statistical universal: Phonological neutralization targets word-ends over beginnings.

    2019

  • Morphological priming without semantic relationship in Hebrew spoken word recognition

    2019

  • The field is not the lab, and the lab is not the field: Experimental linguistics and endangered language communities

    2018

  • Phonological grammars evolve to preserve information at word beginnings

    2018

  • Root-letter priming in Maltese visual word recognition

    2018

  • Fixed prosodic effects in Austronesian: an Optimality-Theoretic account

    2018

  • Onset clusters, syllable structure and syllabification in Maltese

    2018

  • Lexical representation and processing of word-initial Morphological alternations: Scottish Gaelic mutation

    2017

  • Phonological restrictions on lenition in Scottish Gaelic

    2016

  • Auditory masked priming in Maltese spoken word recognition

    2015

  • ACTIV-ES: A comparable, cross-dialect corpus of 'everyday' Spanish from Argentina, Mexico, and Spain

    2014

  • Perception of Scottish Gaelic alternating (leniting) consonants [Poster]

    2013

  • The role of prosodic templates in diachrony

    2013

  • Perception of Scottish Gaelic alternating (leniting) consonants

    2013

  • Stress: Modern Hebrew

    2013

  • Anti-Markedness Patterns in French Epenthesis: An Information Theoretic Approach

    2012

  • Anti-markedness patterns in French epenthesis: An information-theoretic approach

    2011

  • Tier Segregation

    2011

  • Anti-markedness patterns in French deletion and epenthesis

    2011

  • How Specialized are Specialized Corpora? Behavioral Evaluation of Corpus Representativeness for Maltese.

    2010

  • How specialized are specialized corpora? Behavioral evaluation of corpus representativeness for Maltese

    2010

  • Lexical access, effective contrast and patterns in the lexicon

    2009

  • Auditory and Visual Lexical Decision in Maltese

    2009

  • Creating a Web-based Lexical Corpus and Information-extraction Tools for the Semitic Language Maltese

    2009

  • Laura J. Downing (2006). Canonical forms in prosodic morphology.(Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 12.) Oxford \ New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. x+ 284.

    2009

  • Lexical Access, Effective Contrast, and Patterns in the Lexicon

    2009

  • The Cambridge handbook of phonology

    2007

  • Semitic Mophology: Root-based or word-based. Morphology, volume 16, Number 1/July 2006

    2006

  • Affix-favored contrast inequity and psycholinguistic grounding for non-concatenative morphology

    2006

  • Semitic morphology: Root-based or word-based?

    2006

  • Semitic Morphology: Root-Based or Word-Based? [Special Section]

    2006

  • A fixed prosodic theory of nonconcatenative templaticmorphology

    2005

  • A Fixed Prosodic Theory of Nonconcatenative Templatic Morphology

    2005

  • Conspriracies of Contrast in Paradigm Structure

    2005

  • Gestural motor programs account for asymmetries in loanword adaptation patterns

    2003

  • Templatic effects as fixed prosody: The verbal system in Semitic

    2003

  • Gestural Motor Programs and the Nature of Phonotactic Restrictions: Evidence from Loanword Phonology

    2003

  • Templatic effects as fixed prosody

    2003

  • Erratum: "Emergent iambs: Stress in Modern Hebrew" (Lingua (2003) vol. 113 (239-270) S0024384102000876)

    2003

  • Emergent Iambs: Stress in Modern Hebrew

    2003

  • Neighborhood density and the root-affix distinction

    2002

  • Loanword Phonology in Modern Hebrew

    2002

  • Modern Hebrew loanword phonology

    2002

  • The emergence of fixed prosody

    2000

  • Root-and-pattern morphology without roots or patterns

    2000

  • The inadequacy of the consonantal root: Modern Hebrew denominal verbs and output–output correspondence

    1999

  • The Inadequacy of the Consonantal Root: Modern Hebrew Denominal Verbs and Output-Output Correspondence

    1999

  • Head dominance in Modern Hebrew prosodic morphology

    1999

  • Roots and Correspondence: Denominal Verbs in Modern Hebrew

    1998

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