Research Overview

The goal of phonological theory is to understand the speech sound patterns of human language and the mental representations that underlie them. For native speakers, this knowledge is largely unconscious and deployed in an automatic fashion. Although the languages of the world are diverse, a key insight of phonological research is that the sound systems of the world’s languages have much in common. This fits with the capacity of children to acquire whichever language is spoken around them without explicit instruction. Understanding the phonological building blocks and organizational properties that are shared across languages, as well as the ways in which they can differ, are primary endeavors of my research. The focal phenomena that my research examines are patterns governing the distribution of segments (i.e. consonants and vowels) in language, especially those that enhance the well-formedness of co-occurring segments in a word.

My research probes relational structures in the temporal and spatial dimensions that govern segmental interactions. It finds that these relations, as well as well-formedness constraints on the outcomes that they facilitate, constitute organizing principles in segmental patterns. In the temporal dimension, locality serves as a basis for relating segments, such that adjacent segments are more prone to mutual restrictions. The spatial dimension has two components: the symmetric component, which increases with segments’ similarity, and the anti-symmetric component, tied to differences in the prominence of segments, such as a contrast in whether a segment occurs in a stressed or unstressed syllable. Each of these relational sources can influence which segments interact. Moreover, how they serve to control segmental interactions is regulated, in part, by constraints on phonological output forms that are grounded in the mechanisms of speech production and perception.

One of the empirical domains in which I focus is harmony patterns, where segmental assimilation operates at a distance and/or potentially affects multiple segments. These systems offer a prime testing field in which to probe the various dimensions that govern segmental interactions, because relations grounded in similarity (spatial symmetry) or prominence (anti-symmetry) can interact with and override local (temporally based) relations. My investigations are multi-faceted. They include case studies of individual language patterns, comparisons within language clusters and dialects, and broad-based cross-linguistic typological research. The modes of investigation that I have employed include studies based on phonological descriptions of segmental distributions, as well as experimental studies, which have generated articulatory and acoustic data, and also psycholinguistic behavioral data. These diverse approaches cast light on my research themes from different angles to provide a more complete picture.

Primary Projects