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Visiting Assistant Professor
Linguistics, 453C Lorch Hall-1220
tessiera@umich.edu Homepage
Anne-Michelle is a Visiting Assistant Professor and Researcher from the University of Alberta. She studies how the sound patterns of language are learned, especially by children learning their first language (around ages two and six), but also by adult and child second language learners and by learning algorithms. Her acquisition research is driven by the larger theoretical search for universals, asymmetries, and tendencies among the phonologies of the world's languages, and the questions of why children make the phonological mistakes they do, and not the ones they don't, and how they get from initial to target states. In search of these answers, Anne-Michelle uses existing corpora, artificial language wug-tests and computer simulations, all as seen through the lens of constraint-based phonological grammars (most notably Optimality Theory, Harmonic Grammar and also Harmonic Serialism). She also harbours interest in topics like phonological speech errors, morpho-phonological acquisition and natural language semantics.
