Welcome!

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University.

I am primarily interested in how morphophonological paradigms are learned. I look at how paradigm learning is affected by different cognitive biases, and how statistical learning interacts with such biases. I address this question using experiments (wug tests, artificial grammar learning), comparative data on language change over time, and quantitative modeling.

My empirical focus is on Austronesian languages. Languages I have worked on include Seediq (Atayalic), Malagasy (Malayo-Polynesian), Māori (Malay-Polynesian), and Yongning Na (Sino-Tibetan).

My dissertation, titled Phonological markedness effects in paradigm reanalysis, looks at the interaction of frequency-matching with markedness-avoidance in Malagasy, Samoan, and Māori. Details can be found here.

I’m also a member of the Cornell Phonetics Lab. Please check out what we are up to!