(an MRI image of me saying [r])

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

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

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

• 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)

Work on bases or URs of morphological paradigms:

• [submitted] Modeling analogy as probabilistic grammar. In Juliette Blevins, (ed.), Analogy in Grammar: Form and Acquisition. Oxford University Press.
• [submitted] A restricted model of UR discovery: Evidence from Lakhota
• [in prep.] Lexical and morphological conditioning of paradigm gaps. In Curt Rice (ed.), When nothing wins: Modeling ungrammaticality in OT. Equinox Publishing
• [under revision] Base-driven leveling in Yiddish verb paradigms.
• [2008] Inflectional paradigms have bases too: evidence from Yiddish. In Asaf Bachrach and Andrew Nevins (eds.) The Bases of Inflectional Identity. Oxford University Press.
• [2008] Explaining universal tendencies and language particulars in analogical change. In Jeff Good (ed.) Language Universals and Language Change. Oxford University Press.
• [2005] The morphological basis of paradigm leveling (Preprint version of paper that appears in Laura Downing, Tracy Alan Hall, Renate Raffelsiefen, eds., Paradigms in Phonological Theory . Oxford University Press )
• [2004] Sub-optimal paradigms in Yiddish. In V. Chand, A. Kelleher, A. Rodríguez, and B. Schmeiser, eds., WCCFL 23 Proceedings (Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, pp. 1-14).
• [2003] A quantitative study of Spanish paradigm gaps. In G. Garding and M. Tsujimura, eds., WCCFL 22 Proceedings (Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, pp. 1-14).
• [2002] The identification of bases in morphological paradigms (UCLA dissertation)
• [2002] Base selection in analogical change in Yiddish (In J. Larsen and M. Paster, eds., BLS 28, 1-13)

Inductive learning of morphological and phonological rules

• [in prep.] Natural classes are not enough: Biased generalization in novel onset clusters. Comments welcome!
• [in prep.] Gradient phonological acceptability as a grammatical effect. Comments welcome!
• [2008] From clusters to words: Grammatical models of nonce word acceptability. Handout of talk presented at 82nd LSA, Chicago, 3 Jan 2008.
• [in press] How many grammars am I holding up? Discovering phonological differences between word classes. WCCFL 26, Cascadilla Press.
• [2006] (with Bruce Hayes) Modeling Productivity with the Gradual Learning Algorithm: The Problem of Accidentally Exceptionless Generalizations (to appear in Gisbert Fanselow, Caroline Féry, Matthias Schlesewsky, and Ralf Vogel (eds.), Gradience in Grammar. Oxford University Press)
• [2006] Gradient phonotactic effects: lexical? grammatical? both? neither? (LSA talk handout, Jan 7, Albuquerque)
• [2003] (with Bruce Hayes) Learning nonlocal environments. (Handout from 2003 LSA talk, Jan 4, Atlanta)
• [2002] (with Bruce Hayes) Modeling English Past Tense Intuitions with Minimal Generalization. In Maxwell, Michael (ed) Proceedings of the Sixth Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology. Philadelphia, July 2002. ACL.
• [2002] The lexical bases of morphological well-formedness (in Bendjaballah, Dressler,Pfeiffer and Voeikova, Morphology 2000. Benjamins)
• [2000] (with Bruce Hayes) Distributional encroachment and its consequences for phonological learning. In Adam Albright and Taehong Cho (eds.), UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (Papers in Phonology 4), 179-190.
• [1999] An Automated Learner for Phonology and Morphology: A (somewhat outdated) introduction to the Albright and Hayes Minimal Generalization learner

Empirical tests of the Albright and Hayes Minimal Generalization Learner

• [2003] (with Bruce Hayes) Rules vs. analogy in English past tenses: A computational/experimental study Cognition 90, pp. 119-161.
• [2002] Islands of reliability for regular morphology: Evidence from Italian. Language 78: 684-709.
• [2001] (with Argelia Andrade and Bruce Hayes) Segmental Environments of Spanish Diphthongization. In Adam Albright and Taehong Cho, eds., UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 7 (Papers in Phonology 5), 117-151.
• The productivity of infixation in Lakhota. To appear in UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics.

Other topics

• [in press] (with Giorgio Magri and Jennifer Michaels) Modeling doubly marked lags with a split additive model. In BUCLD 32 Proceedings.
• [2007] Cheap but not free: Commentary on Pfau’s ‘Cheap repairs’. In Carson Schütze and Vic Ferreira (eds.) The state of the art in speech error research: Proceedings of the LSA Institute Workshop. Cambridge, MA: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, pp. 35–52.
• [2004] The Emergence of the Marked: Root-domain Markedness in Lakhota (LSA talk handout, Jan 10, Boston)

Scripts and software

• Segmental similarity calculator, using the "shared natural classes" method of Frisch, Broe, and Pierrehumbert (1997)
• Whole word alignment and similarity calculator, using Levenshtein/Minimum String Edit distance, with substitution costs based on segmental similarity
• Simple Perl script to "babble" words of various lengths, given an inventory of possible onsets, nuclei, and codas

• MIT, 24.962 Advanced Phonology, Spring 2007 (with Donca Steriade)
• MIT, 24.949/9.601 Language acquisition, Spring 2006 (with Ken Wexler)
• MIT, 24.964 Sound Change and Phonological Theory, Fall 2005 (with Flemming/Kenstowicz/Steriade)
• MIT, 24.901 Language & Its Structure I: Phonology, Fall 2005
• LSA Summer Institute, Inductive learning of rules and constraints, Summer 2005 (with Josh Tenenbaum)
• MIT, 24.964 Experimental approaches to theoretical questions in phonology, Spring 2005 (with Edward Flemming)
• MIT, 24.962 Advanced Phonology, Spring 2005 (with Donca Steriade)
• MIT, 24.964 Modeling Phonological Learning, Fall 2004
• UCSC, Ling 140 (Language Change), Spring 2004
• UCSC, Ling 160 (Language Engineering), Winter 2004
• UCSC, Ling 80V (The Structure of the English Vocabulary), Fall 2003
• UCSC, Ling 163 (Computational Morphology & Phonology), Spring 2003
• UCSC, Ling 102 (Phonology 2), Winter 2003
• UCSC, Ling 80V (The Structure of the English Vocabulary), Fall 2002