Welcome to AMT’s academic website
Hello and welcome. I am an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
My UBC Child Phonology Lab Website!
Many thanks to RAs Penny Raymond and Danielle Lefebvre for bringing this site to life, and to Yoann Léveillé for currently keeping it going.
What I Do
I am a theoretical phonologist who studies acquisition. When I have to put keywords on an abstract, they usually include “constraint-based” and/or “learning algorithms”, but I also work on things like lexical avoidance, U-shaped development, L2 production and perception in childhood, prosodic processing with cochlear implants, and shitgibbons.
My current projects involve (1) child and adult learners knowledge of English onset clusters with and without accented pronunciations (with Claire Moore Cantwell and Ashley Farris-Trimble) and (2) the acquisition and acceptability of French liaison (with Karen Jesney, Marie-Eve Bouchard and others), sometimes using both Gradual Symbolic Representations (Smolensky and Goldrick 2016: see Tessier and Jesney, 2020 AMP proceedings) and some adult wug-testing that has become more focused on h-aspire and related mysteries (see Jesney et al, 2022 AMP Proceedings.) Recently I’ve also gotten back to thinking about L1/L2 phonological modeling and consequences of different learning algorithns (see Zhang and Tessier, 2014), and currently Karen and I are writing a paper about simulating French liaison learning with UR constraints and some older-school X-slot analyses; stay tuned.
A while back I wrote an advanced undergraduate textbook about Phonological Acquisition that additionally teaches the basics of OT along the way. (P.S. If you are going to use my textbook for teaching, feel free to email me so I can tell you the things I’ve realized that don’t work in it, to save you the nuisance of discovering them yourself in class.) Most semesters, I teach one or two classes and thus have office hours, but it’s always easiest to arrange to see me by just emailing.
I am also lucky enough to advise a lot of great students – go look at my lab webpage and its current members
What’s Here?
So far this site contains links to my publications, many of which work, and my brief CV. What’s still missing are links to most talks and posters from before 2016. If any of the links are broken, or if you don’t have access to any of them, feel free to email me to get a copy.
The Story of How I Got Here
After completing my Ph.D. at Umass Amherst in 2006, I was appointed as an Assistant and then Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Alberta for a decade, but in 2015/2016 I resigned from that job for family reasons and moved to mid-Michigan. Between 2016 and 2018, I was affiliated with the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, as a Lecturer occasionally in Linguistics but mostly in Psychology, and as a Research Investigator at the (now-defunct) Center for Human Growth and Development, mostly through the generosity of Ioulia Kovelman. From 2016-2019 I was also an Adjunct Professor in Linguistics at Simon Fraser University, which housed my SSHRC Insight grant with co-PI Ashley Farris-Trimble, predominantly kept aloft by then-postdoctoral fellow Claire Moore-Cantwell (now faculty at UCLA.) Also along the way, for several years I was an Associate Editor at Glossa (an open access general theoretical linguistics journal), and before that at Lingua before the entire Editorial Board quit and formed Glossa. I would also like to formally mention to all graduate students or similarly interested junior colleagues that planning to get tenure twice in your academic career with a three year hole in the middle is not super ideal, maybe try to organize your life differently, just a suggestion. But I am very grateful to have sufficiently stuck the landing twice and I’m really planning on not doing it ever again.
About my website
This website is based on the academicpages template created by Stuart Geiger and hosted on GitHub pages. I acquired this site in July 2018 in my quest to create a professional online presence that didn’t make me look like the old person who learned html in 2002 that I am, so I apologize for anything that works less well than it should, and please email me so I can help. If you find something on my website that works better than it should, it is probably thanks to this guy.