Welcome!
Starting 2022, I am adjunct faculty at the Department of Linguistics, University of North Texas, where I teach courses on Computational Linguistics.
Formerly, I was was a post-doctoral researcher with Sabine Stoll's language acquisition group in the Department of Comparative Language Science and member of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE) at the University of Zurich. As part of these groups, I processed and statistically analysed longitudinal audio-visual corpora of adult-child interactions from typologically maximally diverse languages. Research topics included automatic detection of repetitive patterns in child-surrounding speech (CSS; Moran et al., 2019; Lester, Moran, et al. 2022), prosodic cues to grammatical categories in CSS and child-produced speech (Lester et al., 2020), and factors influencing the acquisition of consonant phonemes (Moran, Lester, et al., in prep).
My general approach
My research blends corpus, computational, and experimental methods to explore how the statistical properties of texts can inform our theories of linguistic representation, acquisition, and processing in production and comprehension.
I emphasize the role of language as symbolic communicative code; accordingly, I rely heavily on information theory to describe the functional architecture of language.
While I do my best to remain theory-neutral, my sympathies tend to fall with the usage-based, constructionist, and lexicalist theories.
Starting 2022, I am adjunct faculty at the Department of Linguistics, University of North Texas, where I teach courses on Computational Linguistics.
Formerly, I was was a post-doctoral researcher with Sabine Stoll's language acquisition group in the Department of Comparative Language Science and member of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE) at the University of Zurich. As part of these groups, I processed and statistically analysed longitudinal audio-visual corpora of adult-child interactions from typologically maximally diverse languages. Research topics included automatic detection of repetitive patterns in child-surrounding speech (CSS; Moran et al., 2019; Lester, Moran, et al. 2022), prosodic cues to grammatical categories in CSS and child-produced speech (Lester et al., 2020), and factors influencing the acquisition of consonant phonemes (Moran, Lester, et al., in prep).
My general approach
My research blends corpus, computational, and experimental methods to explore how the statistical properties of texts can inform our theories of linguistic representation, acquisition, and processing in production and comprehension.
I emphasize the role of language as symbolic communicative code; accordingly, I rely heavily on information theory to describe the functional architecture of language.
While I do my best to remain theory-neutral, my sympathies tend to fall with the usage-based, constructionist, and lexicalist theories.
