Congratulations to PhD student Jane Li for receiving a Social Science and Humanities Research Council (of Canada) Doctoral Fellowship!

Project Title: Allomorph computation in language production: a cross-linguistic study of speeded inflection

Field: Linguistics, Psycholinguistics

Project Description: When we want to speak, how do we mentally plan the sounds that eventually come together to form the word? This process seems trivial on the surface, but complications arise when one thinks of the finer details. One of the big wrinkles to this process is allomorphy — when a unit of meaning has multiple forms. For example, the English plural has three regular allomorphs: dog[z], cat[s], and leash[ɨz]. How do make sure we get the right allomorph? This is a question that has received a lot of attention in phonological theory (the first analysis of the English plural was almost 100 years ago!) yet severely understudied in psycholinguistics. My research hopes to bridge this gap by bringing together behavioural evidence from English and other languages (the content of this proposal) and potentially electrophysiological (EEG) evidence to shed light on the fine-grained timing properties of the processes described.

Advisor: Colin Wilson

About Me: I am from Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada. I graduated from Simon Fraser University in 2021 with a degree in Linguistics and minor in Philosophy. I am currently a third year PhD student in the department. I am interested in morpho-phonology, and specialize in using behavioural experiments (speeded inflection, naming) to draw out the properties of phonological or morphological mental representations.

In the short term: I want to finish this PhD and sketch out a preliminary theory of morpho-phonology in language production while I’m at it. In the long term: I want to keep studying the representational basis of morphology, especially with non-English languages, perhaps as a faculty member somewhere back home…