Anne Pycha

IGERT Post-Doctoral Fellow

Institute for Research in Cognitive Science

University of Pennsylvania

pycha at sas dot upenn dot edu

 

Affiliations

Psycholinguistics Lab of Delphine Dahan, University of Pennsylvania

Phonetics Lab of John Kingston, University of Massachusetts

 

Education

Ph.D in Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, 2008

 

Professional interests:

Production, perception, and cross-linguistic patterning of spoken words.

 

 

CV

Available in PDF format here (updated September 2009)

 

Research motivation

Human language employs categorical representations as well as gradient details. The dilemma for researchers lies in determining, for a particular linguistic behavior, whether it is best characterized as categorical or gradient, and thus whether its source lies in higher-order cognition or lower-level physical events. This problem takes on a special form in the study of word structures, where many linguistic behaviors that are arguably categorical (therefore morphological or phonological) closely resemble those which are arguably gradient (therefore phonetic), which suggests that categorical processes are merely derivative or emergent versions of their gradient counterparts. My research addresses this problem by combining theoretical and experimental techniques. As a theoretical linguist, I analyze in-depth data from specific languages and develop generalizations based upon cross-linguistic typologies. As an experimental psychologist, I design studies to collect behavioral data, such as eye movements and discrimination judgments, and interpret the results using statistics. I take an empirical stance, not a dogmatic one, toward the diverse and complex outcomes produced by this combination of techniques. Nevertheless, I advance the general argument that categorical representations in word structures bear unique signatures which crucially distinguish them from their gradient counterparts. That is, morphology, phonology, and phonetics – despite their resemblances –  form three independent domains of human language.

 

Peer-reviewed publications

Pycha, A. (To appear, 2010). A test case for the phonetics-phonology interface: Gemination restrictions in Hungarian. Phonology 27: 2 (pre-publication version)

 

Pycha, A. (2009). Lengthened affricates as a test case for the phonetics-phonology interface. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 39(1):1-31. (PDF)

 

Caballero, G., M.J. Houser, N. Marcus, T. McFarland, A. Pycha, M. Toosarvandani, and J. Nichols. (2008). Nonsyntactic ordering effects in noun incorporation. Linguistic Typology 12(3): 383-422. (PDF)

 

Pycha, A., Inkelas, S., & Sprouse, R. (2007). Morphophonemics and the lexicon: a case study from Turkish. In M.J. Solé, P. Beddor, & M. Ohala (eds.) Experimental Approaches to Phonology (pp 369-385). Oxford University Press. (pre-publication version)

 

Additional publications

Pycha, A. (2008). Morpheme strength relationships in Hupa and beyond. In S. Tuttle (ed.) Working Papers in Athabaskan Languages, No. 7 (pp. 107-132). Fairbanks: Alaska Native Languages Center.

Pycha, A. (2008). Partial blocking. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society 41, Vol. 1 (2005) (pp 415-430) Chicago: University of Chicago.

Pycha, A. (2007). Phonetic vs. phonological lengthening in affricates. Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences,1757-1760. (peer-reviewed conference paper)

Pycha, A. (2006). A duration-based solution to the problem of stress realization in Turkish. UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report, 141-151.

Pycha, A., Shin, E., & Shosted, R. (2006). Directionality of assimilation in consonant clusters: An experimental approach. UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report, 152-166.

Pycha, A., Nowak, P., Shin, E., & Shosted, R. (2003). Phonological rule-learning and its implications for a theory of vowel harmony. In G. Garding &  M. Tsujimura (eds.). Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 22. (pp 423-435) Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

 

Dissertation: Morphological Sources of Phonological Length

Linguistics, UC Berkeley, 2008. Committee members: Professors Sharon Inkelas, Keith Johnson, Larry Hyman, and Johanna Nichols

(abstract) (PDF, 254 pages)