Midsaggital view of Adam

(an MRI image of me saying [r])

Adam Albright

MIT Linguistics and Philosophy
77 Massachusetts Ave, 32-D808
Cambridge, MA 02139

Office: Bldg. 32-D830
email: albright@mit.edu


my CV in PDF format

`

Research Interests

Main projects:

  • Experimental testing and computational modeling of gradient phonotactic well-formedness
  • Investigating the organization of paradigms: which forms are "based on" other forms? How do people learn this? How can it be modeled computationally?
  • Testing the "psychological reality" of productive and non-productive morphological processes by means of "Wug Testing" native speakers with novel words
  • Understanding paradigm gaps: cases where speakers are unable to form any acceptable inflected form of a word
  • Collaboration with Bruce Hayes on computational modeling of phonological and morphological acquisition in the face of exceptions.
  • Computational modeling of historical change, as a way to probe the role of synchronic vs. diachronic forces in shaping phonology

Other interests:

  • Yiddish phonology and morphology
  • Lakhota phonology and morphology (and many other topics in Lakhota)
  • The history of stress in Welsh, and the proper treatment of historical change within OT

 

 

Education

  • Ph.D. from UCLA, June 2002.
    The identification of bases in morphological paradigms
  • M.A. from UCLA, December 1998.
    Phonological subregularities in productive and unproductive inflectional classes: Evidence from Italian
  • B.A. from Cornell University, May 1996.
    (Linguistics and Religious Studies major, with Cognitive Studies minor)
    (Senior Thesis in Linguistics on the history of stress in Welsh, and the analysis of historical change in OT)

 


Papers and Software

Work on bases or URs of morphological paradigms:

Inductive learning of morphological and phonological rules

Empirical tests of the Albright and Hayes Minimal Generalization Learner

Other topics

Data sets

Scripts and software

 

 

Teaching