My research attempts to develop algorithmic, learning-based acounts of phonological rules and representations, usually from the perspective of language acquisition, using computational and experimental approaches. This involves identifying independently-established psychological mechanisms that could be at play in the process of linguistic development, and using these mechanisms as the components of computational learning algorithms. Such algorithms constitute hypotheses about the processes involved in human learning. Through evaluation of a 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.

Publications