My research focuses on answering questions in theoretical phonology, using techniques from a wide variety of areas, including experimental phonetics, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, semantics, and information theory.
The kinds of questions I am interested in are:
- what discrete categories of sound or form do language users extract from a continuous acoustic or visual signal?
- what relationships may hold between these categories in a given language?
- how are these relationships determined?
- what patterns and processes apply to these categories?
- what linguistic information do these categories convey?
- how do language learners acquire these categories?
- to what extent are these categories, relationships, and processes psychologically real and manifested in perception and production?
- what cognitive processes have led to these categories, relationships, and processes?
- how can these categories, relationships, and processes be modelled in an objective and predictive way?