California State University, Long Beach
1250 Bellflower Boulevard
Department of Linguistics
PSY 114
Long Beach, California 90840
office phone: (562)985-2656
nhall2#csulb.edu (# = @)
I am an assistant professor in the Linguistics Department of California State University Long Beach.
My research interests are in phonology and the phonetics-phonology interface. I have recently completed a project on r-dissimilation in American English. Currently I am doing an acoustic study of epenthetic vowels in Lebanese Arabic, with the help of Nour Kweider and Stacey Jacobson.
Downloadable papers
r-dissimilation in American English This paper presents new data on long-distance r-dissimilation, and argue that it occurs due to perceptual errors. [revised 8/14/2009]
Acoustics of unstressable vowels in Lebanese Arabic (with Maria Gouskova). [To appear in Phonological Argumentation: Essays on
Evidence and Motivation, ed. Steve Parker. London: Equinox]. We show that for some speakers of Lebanese, epenthetic vowels are shorter and more back than lexical vowels. Working in Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC), we propose that phonetic implementation can optionally draw on intermediate members of the chain. Write to me if you would like a pre-print version.
Lexical selection for left-edge stress in children. Based on a study of long (4+ syllable) words in the Compton and Street corpus, I argue that these English speaking children produce a disproportionate number of words with initial main stress.
MAX-Position motivates iterative footing. MAX-Position is a constraint that favors as much phonological material as possible appearing in prominent positions. Such a constraint can explain why languages may prefer to have multiple stressed syllables (iterative footing), and can also account for some allomorphy patterns that result in words having an even number of syllables.