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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.Show Less
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Courses
- HPHistory of Phonology
- FPTIFoundations of Phonological Theory I
- PLPsychology of Language
- CIHWWYALIEWCan I Have a Word With You? A Linguistic Introduction to English Words
- AVWRLPAuditory and Visual Word Recognition and Lexical Processing
- LTLinguistic Typology
- MMorphology
- PLProfessionalism in Linguistics
- TSMWThe Structure and Meaning of Words
- ILIntroduction to Linguistics
- TPTopics in Psycholinguistics
- MLSMeaning in Language and Society
- IPIntroduction to Phonology
- SMELStructure of a Middle Eastern Language
Grants
- ToMCAT: Theory of Mind-based Cognitive Architecture for Teams
Co-Investigator (COI)
2019
$5.0M
Active - Doctoral Dissertation Research: L1 Biases in Learning Root-and-Pattern Morphology
Principal Investigator (PI)
2017
$6.9K
- SBE-RCUK: Experimental and Descriptive Investigations of Welsh (cym) Consonant Mutation
Co-Investigator (COI)
2015
$362.4K
- Doctoral Dissertation Research: Morphological Decomposition in Arabic
Principal Investigator (PI)
2015
$10.7K
- Experimental and descriptive Investigations of Gaidhlig (gla) Consonant Mutations
Co-Investigator (COI)
2012
$300.2K
- Electronic Maltese-English Dictionary
Principal Investigator (PI)
2009
$20.9K
- 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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