Doctoral Alums

2025

Justin Bai
Dissertation: Going to Great Lengths: Contrastive Hyperarticulation of Vowel Duration in English
Advisor: Dr. Rebecca Scarborough

Jonnia Torres Carolan
Dissertation: Bridging Community-Centered Research Strategies with Phonetics & Phonology: An Analysis of Breathy+Consonant Sequences in Hidatsa
Advisor: Dr. Rebecca Scarborough

Katie Conger
Dissertation: Decomposing Idioms: Factors That Impact Perceived Idiomaticity
Advisor: Dr. Bhuvana Narasimhan

Natalie Grothues
Dissertation: Subversive Intertextuality: An Examination of Intertextual ‘Moments’ in American Public School Board Meetings
Advisor: Dr. Chase Raymond

Maureen Kosse
Dissertation: Semiotics of Online Alt-Right Discourse
Advisor: Dr. Kira Hall

Rebecca Kogan Lee
Dissertation: Finding Purpose in Grammar Choices: A Rhetorical Grammar Genre Pedagogy for First-Year College Writers
Advisor: Dr. Laura A. Michaelis

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:ÌýSynchronic 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 UnderstandingÌý
Advisor: Martha Palmer

2022

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

2021

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


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


Dissertation: Integrating Machine Learning into Language Documentation and Description
Advisor:ÌýÌýMans Hulden

Marielle Butters
Dissertation: Negation in four languages of Indonesia
Advisor:ÌýZygmunt 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


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


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:ÌýGrammatical Contraction in Nyang’i: A Descriptive and Comparative StudyÌý
Advisor: Zygmunt Frajzyngier

Stefanie Ramos-Bierge
Dissertation:ÌýClause type and transitivity inÌýWixárika (Huichol): A Uto-Aztecan language
Advisor: Andrew Cowell

2016


Dissertation:ÌýThe Space-time Topography of English SpeakersÌý
Advisor: Bhuvana Narasimhan


Dissertation:ÌýVisual Speech Perception of Arabic Emphatics and GutturalsÌý
Advisor: Rebecca Scarborough

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


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


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


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

2015


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


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


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

Roy Warnock
Dementia and Singing: A Conversation Analysis Case Study of Singing in Everyday Interactions
Advisor: Barbara Fox
Ìý

2014

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


Dissertation: Identification and Representation of Caused Motion Constructions, winner of theÌý2015 Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prize, awarded by the Cognitive Science Society and the Glushko-Samuelson Foundation, forÌýdissertations 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


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


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


Dissertation: Learning to 'Talk Indian