Phonetics/Phonology
My research in this area has focused on addressing a problem faced by laboratory phonologists: How can we decide which speech processes we hear in the acoustic signal are phonological? In a traditional modular feedforward framework of phonology, in which phonetics and phonology form distinct modules and phonology feeds phonetics in an asymmetric fashion, both phonetic and phonological processes display gradience in the acoustic signal, despite phonological processes being modeled as discrete and categorical and phonetic processes being modeled as gradient. To help circumvent misidentifying processes and where they originate from, I did the following in my Ph.D. dissertation (PDF):
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Generated theory-based criteria for the phonetic and phonological properties of phonological and non-phonological processes.
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Generated a multi-step exclusion process to discern between processes which originate at different stages of representation in a modular feedforward framework of phonology.
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Used an under-documented case of vowel insertion in Scottish English (Scottish Standard English & Broad Scots) as a case study to demonstrate how (1) and (2) could be used in future work.
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Psycho- and Neuro- linguistics
My research in this area has focused on how we process language in real time. This research has largely addressed the following questions by using event-related potentials (AKA evoked potential which arises because of the presentation of a stimulus, rather than passive signal that occurs when conscious) in electroencephalogram (EEG):
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Does the parser incrementally process language (1 word at a time) or process language as a whole (only after the sentence has been completed)?
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The results of my research suggest that the parser makes predictions about what's upcoming and then makes revisions at the arrival of unanticipated syntactic material​​.
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Are there two cognitive mechanisms (1 for syntax, 1 for semantics) for parsing which operate in parallel or which operate serially (syntax first, semantics later)?
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The results of my research suggest that-- contra the widely-accepted view in neurolinguistic work-- these mechanisms may actually operate in parallel (with semantic ill-formedness triggering a syntactic revision in the absence of illicit syntactic structure).
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Psychology
My research in psychology was conducted for my B.A. and M.Sc. degrees.
My undergraduate research was focused on expressive writing (a technique employed by clinical psychologists) and how this technique can help improve mental health. In this research, I investigated how increased use of the expressive writing technique results in a decreased use of first-person singular pronouns ("I", "me", "mine") and increased use of "we", "us", "ours". This shift from individualistic thinking to collective thinking in the form of pronoun usage has been associated with improved mental and physical health. In an experiment in which individuals were asked to journal 3+ times a week, I found that this shift in language usage occurred in as little as three sessions.
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My Master's research was focused on whether emotions (both positive and negative) are housed in one hemisphere or whether each hemisphere is responsible for the production of emotions, but of different valences. Using indirect stimulation of the contralateral hemisphere via vibrotactile stimulation, I investigated whether stimulating each hemisphere would affect the degree of negative or positive emotion words used in written language production.
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