Research Interests

~OT syntax
~language acquisition
~language change
~formal theories of learning

Recent Projects  please see papers section for available pdfs

Clitic Doubling in Spoken French
This project investigates the evolving status of the Spoken French clitic system. Evidence from the use and prosody of clitic doubling constructions as well as other distributional and phonological features of the clitic suggest a complex problem of category assignment for the learner.
[ABSTRACT]

Old French V2 and clitic-second
This project developes an OT analysis of word order patters found in OF. Specifically it focusing on the effects of V2 and clitic-second requirements on possible word orders found in the 12th century. I treat these requirements as constraints on feature alignment  following (Legendre 2000).
[ABSTRACT]

Acquisition of French subject clitics & agreement morphology
I am currently involved in Prof. Géraldine Legendre's NSF-funded project to study how French children learn subject pronouns and other markers of agreement morphology.
[ABSTRACT]

English word-final codas
Demuth, Culbertson and Alter (2006), "Word-minimality, epenthesis and coda licensing in the early acquisition of English." Language and Speech  49(2), 137-174.
[ABSTRACT]