I’m a fifth-year PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My research is in phonology, particularly in understanding our phonological representations of allophones and of variation. My work combines theoretical phonology with computational and experimental methods.
Current projects:
- Comparing fully specified lexical representations to abstract lexical representations using phoneme-monitoring of [t] and glottal stop (in-progress)
- Testing contrast vs. abstract vowel representations in Canadian Raising. Presented in talk at AMP, poster at the LSA. Manuscript here
- (with Gaja Jarosz and others) Learning from Exceptional data. Testing humans on generalization from exceptional data and testing computational models to compare learning hypotheses. Results presented by Dr. Jarosz at several venues, most recently as a plenary at AMP 2022.
- (with Gaja Jarosz and Claire Moore-Cantwell) Nonword priming and understanding phonological neighbourhoods with novel methodologies. (in-progress).
I’m very interested in teaching, and would love to chat about teaching, specifically introductory linguistics, phonology, and computational linguistics! Feel free to reach out for materials or discussion.
Download my most recent paper, from the Proceedings of the 2021 LSA: Deriving Frequency Effects from Biases in Learning
To reach me, email me at mbaird (at) umass.edu
My office number is ILC 421G
In 2018, I was interviewed about my thesis research at Dartmouth. Read more about it here