Connor Mayer
Department of Language Science
3151 Social Science Plaza A
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA
92697-5100
Pronouns: he/him/his
Recent updates:
- I just published a paper in Languages called "Disentangling words, clitics, and suffixes in Uyghur", in collaboration with Travis Major and Gülnar Eziz. This is part of the special issue on Theoretical Studies in Turkic Languages.
- Two papers have been published in the proceedings for the 2023 Society for Computation in Linguistics, which will be held in June in Amherst, MA! These are "Rethinking representations: A log-bilinear model of phonotactics", in collaboration with Huteng Dai and Richard Futrell, and "Modeling island effects with probabilistic tier-based strictly local grammars over trees", in collaboration with Charlie Torres, Kenneth Hanson, and Thomas Graf.
I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Language Science at The University of California, Irvine. I got my PhD from the Department of Linguistics at UCLA.
I am a phonologist and phonetician. I study phonological and phonetic learning, as well as the structure of the phonological knowledge speakers acquire. One of my overarching goals as a researcher is to broaden the empirical and methodological scope of phonological research, and in doing so provide new insights into perennial questions. My research relies on a combination of computational and experimental approaches, with phonological theory serving as the nexus between them.
I view computational modeling as a valuable complement to other methodologies in phonological research. Models based on empirical and theoretical results can be used to test claims and generate novel predictions. These predictions can in turn be evaluated against empirical results, allowing our models to be further refined and making progress towards the ultimate goal of closing the loop between modeling and empirical work. My research applies a range of computational tools to research questions in phonology and phonetics, including corpus analysis, formal language theory, neural networks, Bayesian learning, maximum entropy grammars, and biomechanical modeling. On the experimental side, I rely on instrumental phonetic techniques such as acoustic analysis and ultrasound, behavioral experiments, and more traditional elicitation-based techniques.
My current research activities fall into three broad categories: phonotactic learning, the phonetics and phonology of Uyghur (Turkic: China), and speech motor control and biomechanics. You can find more information about my specific research output in these areas on the Research page.