Doctoral Alums

2024

Norielle Adricula
Dissertation: Examining the Role of Inherent and Derived Prominence in Tagalog Voice and Word Order
Advisor: Bhuvana Narasimhan

Jared Desjardins
Dissertation: The Semantics of Latin Morphology: A Case Study on Frequentative Verbs
Advisors: Laura A. Michaelis

Velda Khoo
Dissertation: Modeling Singlish: Authentic Hybridity in a Model Nation
Advisor: Kira Hall

Ayden Parish
Dissertation: Hearing Voices as Atypical Social Agents
Advisor: Kira Hall

Alyssa Strickler
Dissertation: Synchronic Sound Change as a Unique Look at Representation in /aɪ/ Raising in Fort Wayne, Indiana
Advisor: Rebecca Scarborough

2023

Ghazaleh Kazeminejad
Dissertation: Computational Lexical Resources for Explainable Natural Language Understanding 
Advisor: Martha Palmer

2022

Olivia Marrese
Dissertation: Just as a participants’ resource: Scales, stance, and action in interaction 
Advisor: Chase Raymond

2021

Ling Liu
Dissertation: Morphological Generation with Deep Learning Approaches
Advisor: Mans Hulden

Irina Wagner
Dissertation: Conversational Storytelling in Arapaho: A Grammar of Narrative Initiations
Advisor: Andrew Cowell

Sarah Moeller
Dissertation: Integrating Machine Learning into Language Documentation and Description
Advisor:  Mans Hulden

Marielle Butters
Dissertation: Negation in four languages of Indonesia
Advisor: Zygmunt Frajzyngier

2020

Evan Coles-Harris
Dissertation: Phonetic Convergence and Dialect Change in Nanjing, China
Advisor: Rebecca Scarborough

Jesus Villalpando
Dissertation: Grammatical Aspect in Norogachi Rarámuri (Tarahumara; Uto-Aztecan)
Advisor: Zygmunt Frajzyngier

2019

Tao Lin
Dissertation: Automatic Classification of Verb-Direction Constructions in Mandarin Chinese
Advisor: Laura Michaelis and Martha Palmer

Marcus Avelar
Dissertation: Urban Spirits: Language, Race, and Modernity among Umbandistas in São Paulo, Brazil
Advisor: Kira Hall

Yahya Aseri
Dissertation: Encoding semantic relations between the predicate and participants through Arabic verbal morphology: A systems interaction approach
Advisor: Zygmunt Frajzyngier

Timothy O'Gorman
Dissertation: Bringing together computational and linguistic models of implicit role interpretation
Advisors: Martha Palmer and Laura Michaelis

Kevin Stowe
Dissertation: Syntactic and semantic improvements to computational metaphor processing
Advisor: Martha Palmer

2018

Luciana Marques
Dissertation: Perception of vowel nasality contrast in Brazilian Portuguese
Advisor: Rebecca Scarborough

2017

Samuel Beer
Dissertation: Grammatical Contraction in Nyang’i: A Descriptive and Comparative Study 
Advisor: Zygmunt Frajzyngier

Stefanie Ramos-Bierge
Dissertation: Clause type and transitivity in Wixárika (Huichol): A Uto-Aztecan language
Advisor: Andrew Cowell

2016

Steve Duman
Dissertation: The Space-time Topography of English Speakers 
Advisor: Bhuvana Narasimhan

Maha Foster
Dissertation: Visual Speech Perception of Arabic Emphatics and Gutturals 
Advisor: Rebecca Scarborough

Niloofar Khalili 
Dissertation: Contact-induced Cross-dialectal Phonetic Variability in an Endangered Iranian Language: The Case of Taleshi
Advisor: Rebecca Scarborough

Aous Mansouri
Dissertation: Stative and Stativizing Constructions in Arabic News Reports: A Corpus-Based Study
Advisor: Laura Michaelis

Katherine Phelps Ridgeway
Dissertation: Phonetic training strategies for non-native speech perception
Advisor: Rebecca Scarborough

Richard Sandoval
Dissertation: Gesture-Speech Bimodalism in Arapaho Grammar: An Interactional Approach
Advisor: Andrew Cowell

Nicholas Williams
Dissertation: Place Reference and Location Formulation in Kula Conversation
Advisor: Barbara Fox

2015

Kevin Gould
Dissertation: Now You See It, Now You Don't: The Influence of Lexical Class, Usage Frequency, and Constructional Content on Semantic Simulation
Advisor: Laura Michaelis

William Styler
Dissertation: On the Acoustical and Perceptual Features of Vowel Nasality
Advisor: Rebecca Scarborough

Ashwini Vaidya
Hindi Complex Predicates: Linguistic and Computational Approaches
Advisors: Martha Palmer and Bhuvana Narasimhan

Claire Bonial
Dissertation: Take a look at this! Form, Function and Productivity of English Light Verb Constructions
Advisors: Martha Palmer and Bhuvana Narasimhan

Da Cheong (Jena) Hwang
Dissertation: Identification and Representation of Caused Motion Constructions, winner of the 2015 Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prize, awarded by the Cognitive Science Society and the Glushko-Samuelson Foundation, for dissertations representing outstanding, original and high impact scholarship in the field of cognitive science
Advisor: Martha Palmer

David Harper
Dissertation: An Analysis of Perceptual Factors in the Evolution of Spanish Approximants
Advisor: Rebecca Scarborough

Michael Thomas
Dissertation: A Grammar of Sakun (Sukur)
Advisor: Zygmunt Frajzyngier

2013

Jill Duffield
Dissertation: Beyond the Subject: The Interaction of Syntax and Semantics in the Production of English Verb Agreement
Advisor: Bhuvana Narasimhan

Joshua Raclaw
Dissertation: Indexing Inferables and Organizational Shifts:'No'-Prefaces in English Conversations
Advisor: Barbara Fox

William Corvey
Dissertation: Leveraging Pragmatic Features for Microblogged Information Extraction During Crises
Advisor: Martha Palmer

Jenny Davis
Dissertation: Learning to 'Talk Indian': Ethnolinguistic Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance
Advisor: Kira Hall

2012

Sean Allison
Dissertation: Aspects of a Grammar of Makary Kotoko
Advisor: Zygmunt Frajzyngier

Susanne Stadlbauer
Dissertation: Displaced Islamic Identities: Language, Time and Space in a Post 9/11 America
Advisor: Kira Hall

Georgia Zellou
Dissertation: Similarity and Enhancement: Nasality from Moroccan Arabic Pharyngeals and Nasals
Advisor: Rebecca Scarborough

Lal Zimman
Dissertation: Voices in Transition: Testosterone, Transmasculinity, and the Gendered Voice Among Female-to-Male Transgender People
Advisor: Kira Hall

2011

Kai-Yun Helen Chen
Dissertation: Sound Patterns in Mandarin Recycling Repair
Advisor: Barbara Fox

Les Sikos
Dissertation: Tipping the Balance: The Modulation of ERP Effects at the Syntax-Semantics Interface
Advisors: Laura Michaelis and Albert Kim

2010

Susan Windisch Brown
Dissertation: Finding Meaning: Sense Inventories for Improved Word Sense Disambiguation
Advisor: Martha Palmer

Kevin Cohen
Dissertation: Paradigms of Evaluation in Natural Language Processing: Field Linguistics for Glass Box Testing
Advisor: Martha Palmer

Armik Mirzayan
Dissertation: Lakota Intonation and Prosody
Advisor: David Rood

Saeko Ogihara
Dissertation: Verb Final Typology
Advisor: Zygmunt Frajzyngier

Jeff Stebbins
Dissertation: Usage Frequency and Articulatory Reduction in Vietnamese Tonogenesis
Advisor: Rebecca Scarborough

2009

Lori Heintzelman
Dissertation: The Re-education of Desire: The Role of Narrative in Religious-based Sexual Identity Transformation
Advisor: Kira Hall

Vicky Tzuyin Lai
Dissertation: Understanding Metaphorical Expressions: Conventionality, Mappings, and Comparison Processes
Advisor: Bhuvana Narasimhan

Chad Nilep
Dissertation: Articulating a Transnational Family: 'Hippo Family' Language Learners in Japan and the USA
Advisor: Kira Hall

Weldu Weldeyesus
Dissertation: Language Socialization and Ensuing Identity Construction Among Ethiopian Immigrants in Metropolitan Denver
Advisor: Kira Hall

2008

Jason Brenier
Dissertation: The Automatic Predictionof Prosodic Prominence from Text
Advisor: Dan Jurafsky

Adam Hodges
Dissertation: The 'War on Terror' Narrative: The (Inter)Textual Construction and Contestation of Sociopolitical Reality
Advisor: Kira Hall

Masako Hoye
Dissertation: Exploration of the Notionof Subject in Japanese
Advisor: Barbara Fox

Jessica Sams
Dissertation: A Syntactic Analysis of Written English Quotatives
Advisor: Laura Michaelis

Hiromi Sumiya
Dissertation: The Effect of Familiarity and Semantics on Early Acquisition of Japanese Numeral Classifiers
Advisor: Barbara Fox

Hui-hsin Tseng
Dissertation: The Use of Morphological Knowledge in Chinese Natural Language Processing
Advisor: Dan Jurafsky

2007

Kyung-Im Han
Dissertation: Consonant Cluster Phenomena: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison.
Advisor: Zygmunt Frajzyngier

Hyun-Jung Yang
Dissertation: Grammar as an Interactional Resource in Korean Spontaneous Conversations
Advisor: Barbara Fox

2006

Hartwell Francis
Dissertation: Transitivity in Arapaho: A Construction Grammar Approach
Advisors: Laura Michaelis and Andrew Cowell

Cynthia Girand
Dissertation: Prenuclear Accentual Structure in Conversational English
Advisor: Alan Bell

2005

Ayako Ikeno
Dissertation: Perceptual and AcousticCues in English Accent Variation: Accent Classification for Speaker Identification
Advisor: Barbara Fox

2003

Phyllis Bellver
Dissertation: An Investigation into the Functional Syntax of Spoken Basque
Advisor: Laura Michaelis

Holly Krech-Thomas
Dissertation: Training Strategies for Improving Listeners' Comprehension of Foreign-Accented Speech
Advisors: Lise Menn, Alice Healy (PSYC)

Kristine S. Stenzel
Dissertation: A Reference Grammar of Wanano, winner of the 2004 Mary R. Haas Award for an unpublished manuscript that “makes a significant substantive contribution to our knowledge of the indigenous languages of the Western Hemisphere”.
Advisors: Barbara Fox, Jule Gomez de Garcia

2002

Valerie Wallace
Dissertation: The Roles of Babble in Language Acquisition: Evidence from Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children
Advisors: Lise Menn, Christine Yoshinaga-Itano (SLHS)

Traci (Curl) Walker
Dissertation: The Phonetics of Sequence Organization: An Investigation of Lexical Repetition in Other-Initiated Repair Sequences in American English
Advisor: Barbara Fox

Linda Nicita
Dissertation: Cognitive Verbs in Spanish: A Discourse Profile of acordarse, creer, saber and Related Verbs
Advisor: Barbara Fox

2001

Doug Roland
Dissertation: Verb Sense and Verb Subcategorization Probabilities
Advisor: Dan Jurafsky

Michelle Gregory
Dissertation: Linguistic Informativeness and Speech Production: An Investigationof Contextual and Discourse-Pragmatic Effects on PhonologicalVariation
Advisor: Dan Jurafsky

2000

Makoto Hayashi
Dissertation: Practices in Joint Utterance Construction in Japanese conversation
Advisor: Barbara Fox

Kristin Homer
Dissertation: A Discourse Constraint on Subject Information Questions
Advisor: Laura Michaelis

William Raymond
Dissertation: Toward a Theory of Grammatical Encoding in Speech Production: Evidence from Speech Errors
Advisors: Alan Bell, Laura Michaelis

1999

Linh-Chan Brown
Dissertation: The Grammaticalization of Directed Motion in Vietnamese
Advisor: Laura Michaelis

Erin Shay
Dissertation: A Grammar of East Dangla: The Simple Sentence
Advisor: Zygmunt Frajzyngier

Debra Biasca
Dissertation: Language Development in Jacobsen(11q Deletion) Syndrome: The Interaction of Language, Cognition and Genetics
Advisor: Lise Menn

1998

Andrea Feldman
Dissertation: Constructing Grammar: Fillers, Formulas and Function
Advisor: Lise Menn

Robert Jasperson
Dissertation: Repair after Cut-off: Explorationsin the Grammar of Focused Repair of the Turn-Constructional-Unit-so-far
Advisor: Barbara Fox

Maria Thomas-Ruzic
Dissertation: Language and Activity: We, you and I in Instructional Talk
Advisor: Barbara Fox

Julia Fisher
Dissertation: Mental Lexicons of Children: Multiple Routes to Lexical Access withImplications for Reading
Advisor: Alan Bell

Tilo Weber
Dissertation: Shared Background and Repair in German Conversation
Advisor: Barbara Fox

1997

Immanuel Barshi
Dissertation: Effects of Linguistic Properties and Message Length on Misunderstandings in Aviation Communication
Advisor: Zygmunt Frajzyngier

1996

Barbara Diekmann
Dissertation: The Mutual Shaping of Task Context and System Interface in Directory Assistance Conversations
Advisor: Barbara Fox

1995

Harold ‘Skip’ Wilcox
Dissertation: Salience Imbalance and Metaphor
Advisor: Lise Menn

1994

Won-Ho Kim
Dissertation: Grammatical Relations and Anaphora in Korean
Advisor: Zygmunt Frajzyngier

Randall Sparks
Dissertation: The Structure of Self-Repair in English Conversation
Advisor: Barbara Fox

Jule Gomez de Garcia
Dissertation: Communicative Strategies in Conversational Kickapoo
Advisor: Allan Taylor

Elizabeth O’Dowd
Dissertation: Prepositions and Particles in English: A Discourse-Based, UnifyingAccount
Advisor: Barbara Fox

1993

Liang Tao
Dissertation: Zero Anaphora in Chinese: Cognitive Strategies in Discourse Processing
Advisor: Barbara Fox

Mei-Chun Liu
Dissertation: Discourse, Grammar, and Grammaticalization: Synchronic and Diachronic Analyses of Mandarin Adverbial markers JIU and CAI
Advisor: Barbara Fox

1992

Eun-Il Kim
Dissertation: Voice in Korean
Advisor: Zygmunt Frajzyngier

Rebecca Burns-Hoffman
Dissertation: A Discourse Analysis of Variationin Children's Language in pre-School, Small Group Settings
Advisor: Lise Menn

1990

Robert Koops
Dissertation: Aspects of the Grammar of Kuteb
Advisor: Zygmunt Frajzyngier

Melissa Axelrod
Dissertation: The Semantics of Temporal Categorization: The Aspectual System of Koyukon Athabaskan
Advisor: David Rood