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Caleb Belth

[keɪləb bɛlθ] (he/him)

Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Utah. I recently defended my PhD dissertation at the University of Michigan.

My research attempts to develop algorithmic, learning-based acounts of phonological rules and representations, usually from the perspective of language acquisition. My research starts by identifying independently-established psychological mechanisms that could be at play in the process of linguistic development. It then uses these mechanisms as the components of an explicit computational algorithm, which constitutes a hypothesis about the process of human learning. Through evaluation of the hypothesized learning algorithm—in particular its accuracy generalizing to unseen test words, its predicted developmental patterns, and its predictions in experimental settings—the algorithm can be interpreted as providing a learning-based account of the rules and representations that it constructs along the way. These structures need not be posited a priori if they can be demonstrated to be the natural consequence of a learning algorithm that is grounded in independent psychological mechanisms. My research is informed by and contributes to linguistic theory, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition.

I am also interested the history and philosophy of science, especially linguistics and biology.

For my research, I have been awarded an NSF GRF, an NDSEG fellowship, and a Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Prize for Distinguished Academic Achievement.

Feel free to contact me at caleb.belth@utah.edu.

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A rock comedian. [image]
Categories: Philosophy, Consciousness



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