Rice fields in Bali, Indonesia
James White
Department of Linguistics
University of California, Los Angeles
3125 Campbell Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
Email: {my first and last name} @ ucla.edu
 

Hello! I am a 4th year graduate student in the UCLA Department of Linguistics.

My advisors are Bruce Hayes and Megha Sundara.

I am also a member of the UCLA Phonetics Lab
and the UCLA Language Acquisition Lab.

 
  Research Interests:
  • Acquisition of phonological alternations
  • Cognitive biases in phonological learning
  • Experimental phonology
  • Phonotactics
  • Gradience in grammar
  • Speech perception
  • Phonetics
  • Austronesian languages
 
  Current Projects:
  • My dissertation work examines a learning bias against "saltatory phonological alternations" (i.e., those that jump over other intervening sounds, such as /p/-->v where /b/ does not change). Adults are biased against such alternation when learning an artificial language. Ongoing work is looking further at the nature of the bias, how it can be modeled computationally, and whether it is displayed by infants.

  • The acoustic correlates of stress and their use in diagnosing a disputed phonological process called syllable fusion in Tongan (with Marc Garellek)
Last updated: April 23, 2012  
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