I consider myself a laboratory morphologist, like others might consider themselves laboratory phonologists. I explore the interplay between morphological theory and language use with behavioral methods and laboratory experiments, and use theoretical insights from anthropology, communicative disorders, computer science, neuroscience, and psychology to add explanatory power.

I am currently working on projects in three strands of research. The strands of research come together to show how we process words and morphemes from the speech signal to complete utterances. Individual projects in various stages of development can be seen below, while the three strands of research are:

Influences on Morphological Learning

In addition to a language's morphological structure, what are other factors that influence learning words and grammatical structure in a new language? My NSF-funded postdoctoral research focuses on how various linguistic and extralinguistic factors affect how we learn morphological alternations. I use artificial language learning tasks with miniature languages that are either similar to English or Arabic in their morphological structure, and measure accuracy rates and error types to assess learning.

Lexical Production and Comprehension

I am curious about how we select words to use and understand the words that others use. For example, do we process speech from virtual assistants like Siri using some of the same subconscious methods that we do with human speech? Or do we use the same types of words to talk to someone who is hard-of-hearing, someone who seems to not speak English as their primary language, and someone in a noisy room?

Morphological Theory

I want to extend morphological theory to capture what we see in typologically diverse languages and psychologically, socially diverse populations. One of the ways I am doing this work is to draw connections between theoretical work in Distributed Morphology and experimental work in psycholinguistics and communicative disorders to demonstrate parallels that otherwise are hidden to researchers not engaged in broad, interdisciplinary bodies of literature. Furthermore, I explore what makes morphology in language "productive", investigating how willing participants are to use extant but unproductive morphological structures with novel words.

Published & forthcoming manuscripts

Morphological productivity in Distributed Morphology

Drake, S. Morphological productivity. in Cambridge Handbook of Distributed Morphology, eds. Artemis Alexiadou, Alec Marantz, Ruth Kramer, & Isabel Oltra-Massuet. Expected publication: 2023.

In this chapter, I discuss how morphological productivity is treated in Distributed Morphology, child language acquisition, and computational models.

Reducing experimenter bias in native vs. non-native speech

Weissler, R. E., Drake, S., [...], & Baese-Berk, M. M. (2023). Examining linguistic and experimenter biases through "non-native" vs. "native" speech. Applied Psycholinguistics, 44(4). doi.org/10.1017/S0142716423000115

We discuss how "native" and "non-native" regarding language and language users are constructs that we, as experimenters, should be cautious to use. We also discuss methods to reduce the bias toward native speech being accepted as the default and norm, beginning in how we design our experiments.

Word choice in multiple listening conditions

Baese-Berk, M. M., Drake, S., Foster, K., Lee, D., Staggs, C., & Wright, J. M. (2021). Lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, and predictability for speech in multiple listening conditions. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661415

Following Lee & Baese-Berk (2020) and Wright & Baese-Berk (2020), we used the LUCID corpus and measures of lexical diversity and sophistication to explore lexical differences in speech to non-native English speakers, speech in noise, vocoded speech, and clear speech.

Maltese diminutives

Drake, S. (2018). The form and productivity of the Maltese morphological diminutive. Morphology, 28(3), 297-323. doi:10.1007/s11525-018-9328-0
Presented at the 90th Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, 10 Jan 2016 [slides]
Presented at the 5th International Conference on Maltese Linguistics, 25 June 2015

Maltese is an especially interesting language morphologically speaking because its lexicon is split between Semitic words and Indo-European words, both of which take their respective morphological structures. I used a wug task to find out whether native Maltese speakers use a morphological diminutive (like 'wuglet') or a lexical diminutive (like 'little wug') when encountering novel words. I also used this task to find out whether native speakers would use Semitic morphology when encountering a novel word that sounded Semitic, and Indo-European morphology when encountering a novel word that sounded Indo-European.

Cascaded semantic activation

Bell, D., Forster, K., & Drake, S. (2015). Early Semantic Activation in a Semantic Categorization Task with Masked Primes: Cascaded or not? Journal of Memory and Language, 85, 1-14. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2015.06.007

If activation is cascaded, the assumption is that semantic properties of the input word are linked to other words in the lexicon; thus, semantically related words should show a congruence effect in a categorization task with a masked prime. Over several experiments, we show that semantic activation is typically not cascaded, and the categorization task alters how the masked prime is processed.

L1 biases in learning root-and-pattern morphology

Dissertation research, funded by a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation and internal grants from the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute and the Graduate and Professional Student Council (UA).

Dissertation [pdf]
Public Dissertation Defense​ [slides]
Presented at the 31st CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, 7 Mar 2018 [poster]
Preliminary Maltese results discussed at UoM's Linguistics Circle, 19 Oct 2017 [slides]
​Presented at the Morphological Typology and Linguistic Cognition workshop, 22 July 2017 [semi-interactive poster]
Presented at the Roots V workshop, 17 June 2017 [poster]
Presented at Mental Lexicon 2016, 20 Oct 2016 [poster]

Learning root-and-pattern morphology involves tracking non-adjacent dependencies: In words ABCD and AHCF, A predicts the presence of C, but doesn't predict the presence of the second element in the string. Previous work shows that artificial grammars mimicking root-and-pattern morphology and vowel harmony are quite difficult for adults to learn. However, previous research also shows that when an artificial grammar has elements of a speaker's native language (such as vowel harmony), those speakers are better able to learn the artificial grammar with analogous structures. My research looks at this in root-and-pattern morphology across native English speakers, native Arabic speakers, and native Maltese speakers.

Manuscripts in preparation

Language and Social Issues: An Introductory Toolkit
With Drs. Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson (industry) and Amy V. Fountain (University of Arizona)
Under contract at Cambridge University Press. Expected publication: 2024

An introductory textbook aimed at undergraduates taking their first sociolinguistics course, or their first linguistics course at all. Chapters include a "toolkit" of linguistic analysis techniques, discussions of codeswitching, language policy and planning, and more, with a broad focus on languages across the globe.

Errors in learning root-and-pattern morphology with Wug Tests

Presented at Mental Lexicon 2018, 25-28 Sept 2018 [poster] [proceedings paper]
​Article under review at Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.

Production tasks in an artificial grammar demonstrate that error patterns in morphology differ based on native language. In my research, I suggest that L1 transfer to an L2 (or Ln) starts after a very short learning period and differs subtly even among closely related languages with productive root-and-pattern morphological systems.

The relationship between working memory and L2 sentence processing

With Dr. Essa Qurbi (Najran University)
Presented at the Words in the World 2020 International Conference, 17 Oct 2020. [slides]
Article under revision for The Mental Lexicon.

We are investigating how measures of working memory correlate with auditory sentence processing in L1 Arabic/L2 English speakers using a self-paced listening task.

Learning "crazy rules" from Wamesa with artificial languages

With Martin Rakowszczyk (Stanford) and Dr. Emily Gasser (Swarthmore)
Manuscript under review at Laboratory Phonology.

The language Wamesa [wad] spoken in Papua New Guinea exhibits consonant mutation at some morpheme boundaries across a set of phonemes that do not belong to a natural class (à la Bach & Harms (1972) "crazy rules"), and similar mutation can be found across related languages in the SHWNG family. Is this mutation learnable outside a natural language context? We find that, to a limited extent, it is, lending support to theories of complexity in learning and language change.

Processing synthetic and natural speech

With Erin Liffiton (Bucknell University)
Presented at the Words in the World 2020 International Conference, 16 Oct 2020. [slides]
Presented at the 179th Annual Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, 7-11 Dec 2020.
Article under revision.

Although speech synthesizers are improving in quality, do we subconsciously process synthetic speech in the same way that we process human speech? We are investigating this using auditory masked priming and auditory lexical decision tasks.

Psycholinguistic theories of the lexicon vs Distributed Morphology

With Dr. Heidi Harley (University of Arizona)
Presented at the 94th Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, 2-3 Jan 2020. [acquisition poster] [language disorders poster]
Presented as colloquia at Bucknell University [25-min slides] and Swarthmore College [45-min slides], Nov. 2019.
Presented at Mental Lexicon 2016, 21 Oct 2016. [poster]
Manuscript in preparation.

Psycholinguistic theories of the structure of the mental lexicon may be more compatible with the framework of Distributed Morphology than at first glance. If the two frameworks are married, there is further potential for theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics to continue to inform each other to create more accurate theories with greater explanatory ability. Current work explores Distributed Morphology in light of morphological impairments and in the order of acquisition of morphosyntactic features.

Maltese broken plurals

With Dr. Rebecca Sharp (industry)
Presented at the 6th International Conference of Maltese Linguistics, 8 June 2017. [slides]
Manuscript in preparation.

Like Arabic, Maltese has a system of both sound (regular) and broken (irregular) plurals. We are building a parser that will predict the form of a broken plural using real and nonsense words, and those intuitions will be tested via acceptability ratings and a wug test with native Maltese speakers.

Lily words: Morphophonological dissimilation in English

With Dr. Lauren Ackerman (Newcastle University)
Presented at the 32nd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Mar 2019 [poster]
Presented at the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America, 5 Jan 2018 [poster] [proceedings paper]
Manuscript in preparation.

We are studying under what conditions the adjectival and adverbial -ly suffixes next to one another are acceptable (e.g., jollily vs. smellily vs. lovelily​), using sentence acceptability judgments and lexical decision tasks.

Conversational bilingual speech

With many members and affiliates of the Douglass Phonetics Lab (University of Arizona)

We used production and perception studies to analyze how L2 English speakers differed in stop consonant reduction depending on their L1 (Japanese, Dutch, Spanish), and also whether there were any differences in reduction across dialects of L1 English speakers (US, Canadian, New Zealand).

Replicating psycholinguistic tests of the Metrical Segmentation Strategy

With many members and affiliates of the Douglass Phonetics Lab (University of Arizona)
Presented at the 177th Annual Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, 16 May 2019 (4pSC36). [poster]

Based on statistical regularities of their language, humans hypothesize word boundaries according to the stress and vowel quality of utterances. Cutler and Norris (1988) formalized this as the Metrical Segmentation Strategy, and previous experiments (e.g., Norris et al., 1995) have borne out these predictions. Here, we present a partial replication of Norris et al. (1995), with some possibilities suggested for what may have occurred for the differences we find.

Collecting data

Specificity and generalization in adaptation to unfamiliar speech

With Dr. Melissa M. Baese-Berk, Kurtis Foster, Dae-Yong Lee, Cecelia Staggs (University of Oregon) & Dr. Jonathan Wright (Penn State University)

We are using a speech-in-noise task to determine whether humans can generalize their experience with accented speech to many different accents, or whether our ability to adapt to unfamiliar speech is accent-specific.

Task-based morphosyntactic error profiles in people with aphasia

With Dr. Brielle Stark (Indiana University)

Using production data from AphasiaBank corpora, we are looking to see whether error profiles differ depending on the assessment task used.

Please email me if you would like a PDF of the papers behind paywalls, or if you would like to chat or collaborate!
sdrake [at] uoregon [dot] edu