UCLA Linguist Kie Zuraw in 2021

Kie Ross Zuraw

Professor
Vice Chair - Director of Undergraduate Studies, UCLA Department of Linguistics
Director of Graduate Studies, UCLA PhD Program in Applied Linguistics

3125 Campbell Hall, Box 951543
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
phone: 310-825-0634
email: kie at ucla dot edu


Research interests

View my CV (as .pdf)

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Papers, mostly downloadable

Pre-print versions are not identical to final published versions.

Zuraw, Kie (2022). Interview with Donka Minkova. Journal of English Linguistics

Zuraw, Kie (2022). Four inclusive practices for the phonology classroom. Proceedings of the 2021 Annual Meeting on Phonology. Ed. by Peter Jurgec, Liisa Duncan, Emily Elfner, Yoonjung Kang, Alexei Kochetov, Brittney K. O'Neill, Avery Ozburn, Keren Rice, Nathan Sanders, Jessamyn Schertz, Nate Shaftoe, and Lisa Sullivan.

Zuraw, Kie, Isabelle Lin, Meng Yang, and Sharon Peperkamp (2021). Competition between whole-word and decomposed representations of English prefixed words. Morphology 31:201-237.
We follow up the production study of Zuraw & Peperkamp 2015 (with additional analysis) with a priming study to show that we can influence how people pronounce words like 'misperceive' by priming morphological structure.
published version

Shoichi Iwasaki, Susan Strauss, Shin Fukuda, Sun-Ah Jun, Sung-Ock Sohn, and Kie Zuraw, editors (2020). Japanese/Korean Linguistics, Volume 26. CSLI Publications.

Zuraw, Kie, Ann M. Aly, Isabelle Lin, and Adam J. Royer (2019). Gotta catch 'em all: skills grading in undergraduate linguistics. Language: Teaching Linguistics 95(4): e406-e427.
How and why we implemented skills grading in undergraduate phonetics and phonology courses.
published version

Zuraw, Kie, Kathleen Chase O'Flynn, and Kaeli Ward (2019). Non-native contrasts in Tongan loans. Phonology 36(1): 127-170.
We show that patterns in Tongan loans from English can be captured using only constraints that plausibly are needed for native-word phonology, including constraints that reflect perceptual strategies.
published version

Daland, Robert and Kie Zuraw (2018). Loci and locality of informational effects on phonetic implementation. Linguistics Vanguard 4(s2).
We consider various challenges to identifying the loci of informational effects on phonetic implementation - do they arise in production, perception, memory, or some combination?
published version

Zuraw, Kie (2018). Beyond trochaic shortening. Language: Phonological Data and Analysis 94(1): e1-e42.
Surveys how languages in the Central Pacific family handle underlying forms like /maali/, including breaking (e.g., Tongan), tochaic shortening (Fijian), and tolerance. Finds limited evidence for productive trochaic shortening. Suggests that neturalizations in core member of paradigm is hard to learn and lexicalization of whole words is one solution. Also finds some divergence between root phonotactics and alternations.
published version

Shih, Stephanie and Kie Zuraw (2017). Phonological conditions on variable adjective-noun word order in Tagalog. Language: Phonological Data and Analysis 93: e317-e352.
Shows that variable word order in Tagalog adjective/noun combinations optimizes for phonological structure, including phonotactic, syllabic, and morphophonological well-formedness preferences that are also found elsewhere in Tagalog grammar. Results indicate that surface phonological information is accessible for word order choice.
published version

Zuraw, Kie and Hayes, Bruce (2017). Intersecting constraint families: An argument for harmonic grammar. Language 93: 497-548.
pre-print version
supplemental materials
In three case studies (Tagalog, French, Hungarian), when two independent families of constraints intersect, Harmonic Grammar provides a better model of variation than competing constraint-based models of variation. In particular, Harmonic Grammar easily captures floor and ceiling effects in both dimensions, with maximal variation in the middle. Supplemental materials include raw data and html files narrating statistical analysis, which can be reproduced using RStudio.

Zuraw, Kie (2017). Variable component interaction: data from Tagalog nasal substitution. In Heather Newell, Máire Noonan, Glyne Piggott, and Lisa Travis (eds.), The structure of words at the interfaces. Oxford University Press, Pp. 126-140.

Zuraw, Kie (2016). Polarized variation. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 15: 145-171.
Many variable phonological phenomena show a U-shaped rather than bell-shaped distribution: there are many items (words or phrases) that always show one behavior, and many that always show the other, with not so many in between. Documents several cases and gives a schematic diachronic model of how U-shaped and bell-shaped distributions could arise.

Minkova, Donka and Kie Zuraw (2016). Ambisyllabicity in English: present and past. The Cambridge handbook of English historical linguistics. Cambridge University Press, Pp. 424-443.

Zuraw, Kie and Sharon Peperkamp (2015). Aspiration and the gradient structure of English prefixed words. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow, UK: the University of Glasgow. Paper number 0382, 1-5.
A production study to look for words that vary between stem-initial aspiration (like mis-type) and non-aspiration (like mistake), and a look at the frequency factors that correlate.
Here's the poster, with some plots that don't appear in the paper.

Zuraw, Kie (2015). Allomorphs of French de in coordination: a reproducible study. Linguistics Vanguard.
Unlike English, French usually retains the second de in a phrase like morceaux de carottes et (de) tomates 'pieces of carrots and (of) tomatoes', but dropping the second de is possible. The rate at which this happens differs depending on whether the two words being coordinated begin with vowels or consonants.
published version.

Zuraw, Kie; Kristine Yu; and Robyn Orfitelli (2014). Word-level prosody of Samoan. Phonology 31: 271-327.
An in-depth look at the word-level prosody of Samoan: stress, vowel length, treatment of vowel sequences, interaction with morphology.
published version

Daland, Robert and Kie Zuraw (2013). Does Korean defeat phonotactic word segmentation?. Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers). Pp. 873-877.
Applies Daland's phonotactic segmentation model to a corpus of Korean; analyzes performance quantitatively, with some qualitative discussion.
published version

Zuraw, Kie (2013). *MAP constraints. Unpublished manuscript.
An edited version of material from an earlier, unpublished version of the 2007 Language paper (below) that did not make it into the published version. That earlier version had limited circulation, and some researchers have since found the *MAP() notation useful and wished for a fuller explanation to cite than the very brief one found in the 2007 paper.

Zuraw, Kie (2010). A model of lexical variation and the grammar with application to Tagalog nasal substitution. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28(2): 417-472.
Examines variation in the application of a phonological rule. Argues for the psychological reality of regularities in the rule's distribution and proposes a model of grammar that encodes the regularities but defers to lexical entries. Compares the rule's behavior cross-linguistically to the factorial typology of the proposed constraint set.
published version

Zuraw, Kie (2009). Treatments of weakness in phonological theory. In Donka Minkova (ed.) Phonological Weakness in English. Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 9-28.
A survey.

Hayes, Bruce, Kie Zuraw, Péter Siptár, and Zsuzsa Cziráky Londe (2009). Natural and Unnatural Constraints in Hungarian Vowel Harmony. Language 85: 822-863.
Tests whether Hungarian speakers apply phonologically unmotivated regularities in the Hungarian lexicon to novel words.
published version

Zuraw, Kie (2009). Frequency influences on rule application within and across words. Proceedings of CLS (Chicago Linguistic Society) 43.
Examines representations of tapping (d -> r) in a written corpus of Tagalog/Filipino. Argues that the grammar restricts where tapping can and cannot occur, but where the grammar allows variation, word and morpheme frequency play roles. Proposes a model in which the outcome of lexical retrieval (whole-word or synthetic) is available to the grammar.
published version

Zuraw, Kie and Yu-An Lu (2009). Diverse repairs for multiple labial consonants. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 27. Pp. 197-224.
Surveys the diverse ways in which Western Austronesian languages handle the addition of the infix -um- to a stem that already contains a labial consonant--a case of McCarthy's "homogeneity of process, heterogeneity of target".
published version

Zuraw, Kie (2007). The role of phonetic knowledge in phonological patterning: Corpus and survey evidence from Tagalog. Language 83. Pp. 277-316.
Supersedes earlier manuscript version.
Argues that Tagalog speakers extend the language's infixing morphology to stems beginning with novel consonant clusters in a way that is consistent with cross-linguistic, phonetically grounded patterns--but, unlike those patterns, difficult to explain as misperception. These new data are taken as evidence in favor of a role for phonetic knowledge in phonological patterning.
published version

Zuraw, Kie (2006). Using the web as a phonological corpus: a case study from Tagalog. EACL-2006: Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics/Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Web As Corpus. Pp. 59-66.
Describes the construction of a written corpus of Tagalog from the web and how it can be used to investigate phonological phenomena. Focus is on intervocalic tapping.
published version

Zuraw, Kie (2006). Language change, probabilistic models of. In Ken Brown, editor, The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition. Boston: Elsevier, 349-357.

Zuraw, Kie (2003). Optimality Theory in linguistics. In Michael Arbib, editor, Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks, 2nd editon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 819-822.
Introduction to OT for the non-linguist cognitive scientist.

Zuraw, Kie (2003). Probability in language change. In Rens Bod, Jennifer Hay, Stefanie Jannedy, editors, Probabilistic Linguistics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 139-176.
Overview of the role of probability in the study of language change: probability as a tool for determining language relatedness; changes in probabilities over time; the role of item frequency in change; the effect of language agents' behavior in a probabilistic environment on change.
References are in a separate file.

Zuraw, Kie (2002). Aggressive reduplication. Phonology 19. Pp. 395-439.
Argues that there is a purely phonological drive for words to be interpreted as reduplicated. (Replaces earlier manuscript version.)
published version

Zuraw, Kie (2002). Vowel Reduction in Palauan Reduplicants. In Proceedings of AFLA 8: The Eighth Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 44. Pp. 385-398.
The way unstressed vowels reduce in Palauan reduplicants suggests that the reduplicant has access to the lexical entry.

Curtin, Suzanne and Kie Zuraw (2002). Explaining Constraint Demotion in a Developing System. In Anna H.-J. Do, Laura Domínguez, and Aimee Johansen, editors, BUCLD 26: Proceedings of the 26th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Cascadilla Press.
Demonstrates how the gradual climb of a faithfulness constraint over a series of markedness constraints, under Boersma's Gradual Learning Algorithm, accounts for learners' variable and stage-like behavior, using truncation in Dutch as a case study.

Zuraw, Kie (2000). Patterned Exceptions in Phonology. Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA.
Analyzes some regularities in the distribution of exceptions in Tagalog. Argues that they are part of the language system, and shows how they can be learned, represented, and used in speaking and listening. Gives a computational model of how speaker-hearer interaction shapes the lexicon.

Zuraw, Kie (1999). Regularities in the Derived Lexicon. University of Alberta Papers in Experimental and Theoretical Linguistics 6: 97-105.
Written version of a talk at the University of Alberta Workshop on the Lexicon in Phonetics and Phonology. Discusses how regularities in the distribution of exceptions are encoded in the grammar.

Zuraw, Kie (1996). Floating Phonotactics: Infixation and Reduplication in Tagalog Loanwords. M.A. thesis, UCLA.
Shows how loanwords can force speakers to make decisions about constraints whose ranking was previously irrelevant. Finds evidence for default ranking of markedness >> faithfulness. (equations in Appendix B are illegible, but main arguments can be followed without them)


Past PhD (co-)advisees, and currently dissertating ones


Teaching and course materials

Fall 2022

Past UCLA courses

For courses with no link, if you were enrolled you can see if the course website is still accessible by logging in to UCLA's Bruin Learn system.

Past special courses outside UCLA


Free software

maxent.ot, by Connor Mayer, Adeline Tan, and Kie Zuraw (2022)

This is an R package, not yet available on CRAN, for incorporating Maximum Entropy constraint grammars into your R scripts. See our AMP talk for why and how, and links to tutorial material.
For now, find code here on github.

UCLA FeaturePad

This is a program I wrote that helps phonology students learn about features (phonetic characteristics that define groups of sounds that pattern together as a "natural class"). FeaturePad lets you select natural classes and perform feature changes; it detects contradictions and redundancies. Windows only.
Go to Bruce Hayes' FeaturePad page to read about or download the program.
You can also read about or download UCLA PhonologyPad, a program written by Dan Albro.
A new and better Java version called Pheatures was developed by Floris van Vugt. You should probably use this instead!

Similarity calculator

This little program calculates similarity between pairs of phones using the shared-natural-classes measure of Frisch, Broe, & Pierrehumbert (2004), Similarity avoidance and the OCP Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22: 179-228.
The program is not very user-friendly, and, because it reuses code from UCLA FeaturePad, runs in Windows only.
Download this file: Similar.zip .
(How do you download the files? It depends on your browser. If you click on the link with the dominant mouse button and a "Save As..." window appears, use that. Otherwise, click with the non-dominant mouse button and choose "Save Link As..." or "Save Target As..." from the menu that appears.)
Unzip it. You should get a folder that contains...


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