NYU Linguistics


Jason Anthony Shaw
Status: PhD candidate
Contact: j a s o n . s h a w@ n y u . e d u

Current TA assignment: Phonological Analysis
taught by Adamantios Gafos

Office hours: Monday, 1-3pm
Location: room 707 (726 Broadway, 7th floor)
Office phone:212-992-8620

I can also be found in room 700, the Ph-Lab.

Curriculum Vitae

Research interests:(laboratory) phonology, morphology, acoustic/articulatory phonetics, learnability, non-native speech production/perception, language contact

General: My research is focused on understanding sound patterns in natural language by studying the cognitive processes which shape them, including perception, production and mental representation. The goal is to develop a formal model of a speaker's demonstrated knowledge of his/her native language which allows us to predict linguistic behavior across the wide range of contexts in which humans use language productively.

Dissertation: My dissertation, 'The temporal organization of syllable structure', argues that structural relations characteristic of syllables are temporal in nature. This claim is supported with analysis of articulatory data from Moroccan Arabic and English, languages claimed to parse similar strings into different syllable structures. I develop a computational model to instantiate the main theoretical claim. The model simulates temporal data allowing for a quantitative evaluation of competing syllabic structures. Results show that the syllabic parses which best fit the articulatory data correspond as well to parses claimed on the basis of metrical patterns.

Languages I've worked on: Chuukese, English, Japanese, Komi, Korean, Moroccan Arabic, Mortlockese, Swiss German

I am also affiliated with Haskins Laboratories where I am a research assistant for Adamantios Gafos.

Japanese lexicon
Japanese character frequency


Journal articles
Shaw, J., A. Gafos , P. Hoole, C. Zeroual. to appear. Syllabification in Moroccan Arabic: evidence from patterns of temporal stability. Phonology 26. 28 pgs. (pre-publication version)

2007. The effect of word learning on the perception of non-native consonant sequences. JASA 122:6, 3697-3709 (paper) [with L. Davidson, T. Adams]

Other publications
Shaw, J. to appear. Compensatory lengthening via mora preservation in OT-CC: theory and predictions. proceedings of NELS 38 (handout) (paper)

Shaw, J. and R. Balusu. to appear. Language contact and phonological contrast: the case of coronal affricates in Japanese loans. In Hasselblatt C., B. de Jonge, M. Norde (eds.): Language Contact in Times of Globalization. 25pgs. Amsterdam: Johns Benjamins. (manuscript)

Shaw, J. 2007. /ti/~/tSi/ Contrast preservation in Japanese loans is parasitic on segmental cues to prosodic structure. presented at: proceedings of ICPhS XVI (paper)

Shaw, J. 2006. Learning a stratified lexicon. proceedings of NELS 36 (paper)

Some recent talks
2008. Temporal stability as an index of syllable structure: data and model. presented at: Northeast Computational Phonology Meeting

2007. A theory of structure mapping in loanwords. presented at: Experimental approaches to OT (handout)

726 Broadway, 7th Floor, Room 707 New York, NY 10003, USA
email: jason.shaw@nyu.edu    phone: 212-992-8615

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