Research and Development Projects
Research: Active Projects
The Syntactic and Semantic Prominence and the Salience of Discourse Entities
I am examining the influence of semantic entailments imposed on a discourse entity by a predicate on that entity's discourse salience for such processes as pronominalization or pronoun resolution. I am investigating this with both psycholinguistic experiments and corpus analysis. In 2005, I defended my dissertation under the advisership of Prof. Stefan Kaufmann of Northwestern University. I also have presented a few papers on this topic at several conferences. See my Papers page for a complete list.
Filled pauses and other hesitation phenomena
I have long been interested in the nature of filled pauses (uh, um) in spontaneous speech. My particular area of interest is interlanguage hesitation strategies: how do second language speakers 'fill' their pauses and how are those pauses perceived by native listeners? I outline my story about these issues and further implications for language teaching in my master's dissertation as well as in this paper. Also, until I became a PhD student, I actively maintained The Filled Pause Research Center, a site devoted to study of filled pauses. The site is currently archived here.
Research: Inactive Projects
Japanese nickname phonology
In Japanese, nicknames are often constructed (especially for girls, children, and intimates) by truncation of the given name and suffixation with chan. However, depending on the root name, differing effects can be observed at the juncture. For instance, Masahiro can become Masachan, Maachan, and possibly Matchan (where the tch represents a geminated affricate). However, Tetsuya becomes only Tetchan and never Teechan or Tetsuchan while Kumiko becomes Kumichan but never Kuuchan or Kutchan. I am developing an account of this variation which also incorporates similar facts from derived compounds (e.g., /koku/ 'country' + /kai/ 'assembly' = /kokkai/ 'The Japanese Diet'). In this paper, I present an optimality theoretic account of this phenomenon using a variable constraint ranking paradigm.
Development
ESL/EFL teaching methods and materials
I have been teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language since 1988. Over the years I have developed a number of useful teaching materials. I am gradually in the process of updating and revising these. See my teaching page for links to these materials.
QuizMaster
I always found the quiz game atmosphere to be motivating for ESL/EFL students. However, when playing the role of quizmaster, Ioften found it difficult (and probably distracting to students) to manage the question list, ask questions, judge answers, and keep score on the chalkboard. Of course, one could delegate some of these responsibilities to students, but then those students can't fully reap the benefit of the lesson. So, years ago, I developed this Visual Basic utility to use on my laptop in the classroom. The utility draws questions at random from a question pool and also keeps score. I found the games go a lot more smoothly with it---much less time is spent managing and more time is spent playing the quiz game.
Sentence Completion Test Maker
One of the instruments that psycholinguists often use to get a quick idea of readers' intuitions on a particular phenomenon is the sentence completion paradigm, in which subjects read a short story (maybe as short as one sentence) and then choose which of several optional continuations they find to be the best. I am currently using this technique in my dissertation described above. Since this is a commonly-used procedure that produces relatively reliable results, I decided to build a utility that will create the tests in ascii or tex format from an input file of coded stimuli. You may download it here. [Note: This is an alpha release. The program runs fine on my machine (cygwin on WinXP), but has not been tested on unix/linux distributions. You will surely have to tweak the code to get it to work on your machine before building the executable.]