Melissa's research focuses on phonology and phonetics, typically examining speech perception and production, with special attention to non-native speakers and listeners. Her work has specifically addressed sources of variation in production and how that variation influences listeners in perception. She has also worked extensively on how various aspects of the perception and production systems interact. Her work is currently funded by the National Science Foundation and by an Incubating Interdisciplinary Initiatives Award from the University of Oregon.

Melissa's Website

Don's research focuses on endangered languages in Papua New Guinea, where he has been conducting fieldwork since 2006. He is interested in language change, both from a theoretical perspective (what kinds of changes are possible in language, and how can we account for them?) and from a methodological one (how can we reconstruct proto-languages?). His research also focuses on synchronic language documentation as well as morphosyntactic description, theory, and typology. Because his research straddles both synchrony and diachrony, and because of his interest in morphosyntax, he is especially interested in theories that can “do it all”—that can accurately model language structure as well as change, and that are compatible with methods of comparative reconstruction. He works primarily with languages of the Madang branch of Trans New Guinea, and is currently involved in a long-term documentation project of the Sgi Bara (or Jilim) language.

Don's Website

Spike's primary interests are documentary fieldwork, historical syntax, and historical/functional phonology. He has been working in South America with languages of the Cariban family since 1988, when he began fieldwork on Panare in Venezuela. A good understanding of historical syntax can only come from a good understanding of typology, and his focus in typology has been on the evolutionary connection between voice and alignment systems. He is increasingly excited at participating in the growth of a functional theory of phonology that could share many (and maybe all) of the foundational presuppositions that underlie our functional theories of morphosyntax. 

 Spike's Website

Volya's research focuses on identifying the characteristics of units and generalizations that language learners extract from the language they hear, the biases that language learners bring to the task, and the way the acquired units and generalizations are used in processing. He uses experimental, corpus-analytic, and computational methods to address these questions. Much of his experimental work uses miniature artificial languages, which allow for complete control over the properties of the language and the training task and facilitate modeling by enabling him to expose the human language learner and the model to the same data. To increase ecological validity, the experimental studies are supplemented by analyses of spontaneous linguistic behavior as recorded by natural language corpora.

Volya's Website

Tyler's primary research interests focus on social and cognitive aspects of language variation and change. Much of his work is firmly sociolinguistic, in that it is interested in understanding language and linguistic patterns in their social context - often following in the quantitative traditions of sociolinguistic research spearheaded by scholars like William Labov and Walt Wolfram - although he also pursues research questions via approaches from computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, lab phonetics, and psycholinguistics.

Tyler's Website

Kris’ research interests include second language acquisition, second language writing, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, and second language assessment. In particular, his research investigates lexicogrammatical development in second language users.  His work also involves the development of natural language processing tools that are used to test and build theories related to second language acquisition and second language writing development (usually using learner corpora).

Kris' Website

Doris’ research has focused on morphology, syntax and semantics of little-studied languages, from typological, functional, and cognitive perspectives. One long-standing focus has been on word order, with a special attention to verb-initial languages and those where order of major constituents is primarily based on cognitive-pragmatic factors such as identifiability and contrastive focus. Principal language areas have included (but are not limited to) South America and East Africa. Ongoing language documentation projects include descriptive grammars and lexicography and text databases.

Doris' Website

Eric's research interests can be covered under the general concern for the relation of language and language processing to general cognition. He assumes that any particular linguistic patterns also potentially reflect patterns of thought beyond this language use. He is also strongly interested in multi-model representations (e.g. co-speech gesture and head movements). Because non-linguistic behavior and patterns of human cognition can vary cross-culturally, he has a strong commitment to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural investigation. Appropriately for this, he has expertise as a descriptive linguist as well. Much of his descriptive and experimental data has been collected first-hand in rural South India.

Eric's Website

Gabriela has conducted research on Zapotec languages since 2002. She has devoted much of her work to studying factors of language maintenance and endangerment with a focus on the impact of migration in the community of speakers of San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec and the influence its mirror community in Los Angeles, California has on the survival prospects of this language. She is heavily engaged in language documentation and is writing a dictionary of Juchitán Zapotec. In addition, Gabriela is engaged in the description of the semantics of spatial language in this variety of Zapotec, and its correlates in cognitive spatial reasoning.

Gabriela's Website

Lisa investigates spoken language production from a developmental perspective. Work in her lab focuses on how motor and language processes interact over developmental time to define the characteristic rhythms of spoken language. This work contributes to our understanding of the representations used in speech planning, how speech timing is achieved, and the phonetic bases of speech segmentation. The findings also provide normative data on prosodic development and help to identify articulatory and acoustic factors that contribute most to the perception of disorder.

Lisa's Website

Julie's research focuses on second language acquisition, specifically the teaching and learning of Interlangauge pragmatics. She is especially interested in the application of innovative instructional interventions, such as synchronous computer-mediated communication, augmented reality (AR), and digital games and simulations to the learning process. Overall, her work addresses ways in which the instructional and/or learning process can be enhanced to include second language pragmatic competencies. She also works as the UO Resident Scholar and the Director of the Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS) at UO.

Julie's Website