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The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by
doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.
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Betsy McCall
Current Research Interests Well, since I'm in my second year of my doctoral program, the immediate plan is to pass my preliminary exams, so most of my research is actually temporarily on hold. Notice I said most, because I can't seem to go a whole year without actually doing something about it. One of my current projects that I've been working on quite a while is on Japanese mimetic palatalization. See a paper by Cheryl Zoll for the currently accepted analysis. A colleague of mine (Kyoko Nagao) and I conducted a study, however, and showed that native speakers, when given nonsense words, did not, in fact, choose the consonants to be palatalized that Zoll (and others before her) predicted. The first step in this process is to show that there is an account of native speaker choice in the nonsense words and that it does also work for existing lexical items, and verify this statistically. This has been done, and presented at two conferences in 1999. I also redid this analysis in my masters thesis which is linked below. This all sounds very linguistic, but we can take this analysis further by explaining the cognitive mechanism that accounts for the behaviour within the study. For this purpose, we can appeal to decision theory, or more specifically, game theory. The study results showed a clear pattern. When choosing which of two consonants to palatalize, when the consonants produced acoustically dissimilar results (i.e. one was significantly more acoustically different than it's unpalatalized counterpart, vs. the second consonant) then the probability of choosing the less ideal consonant was lower than when the two consonants had similar contrastive abilities. So I've been working on this since 1998, and I slowly keep adding more mathematics to it. Much to the chagrin of some linguists. In addition to this long term project, I've recently begun working on a couple other ideas. One of these is modeling language change via differential equations. Such models have been constructed before, but my interest here is in comparing the behaviour of language change to models of speciation. My advisor here at Pitt is Bard Ermentrout, and it's likely that at some point I'll also be spending some research time working on language acquisition in the context of neural models of unsupervised learning. For a copy of my masters thesis on mimetic palatalization: exit project (this is a 60-page Word document and requires a phonetic font). Note that a small portion of this paper has already been extracted and published in a conference proceedings volume and can be found linked on the "completed" research page. I'll include more links to papers in progress as they become available. Return to the main research page.
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| Last modified on: 2003.05.08 Copyright 2003 by Betsy McCall |
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