Hello visitors – I’m happy to
report that I’ve now finished my dissertation and have started a postdoc at
the Institute for Research in
Cognitive Science at Penn. You can find my Penn webpage here. I am leaving this page up, because 1) I
am still in the process of transferring useful information to my Penn page
and 2) I still hope this page can be useful to those checking out the
Cognitive Science department at JHU. (11/10/06)
(updated 6/24/05)
Joan
Chen-Main
Graduate Student
Department of Cognitive Science
Krieger Hall 243
Johns Hopkins University
Email:
joan@cogsci.jhu.edu
Hello visitors - I hope this page makes it
easier for the curious to find out more about what our department is like and the
things that we do.
Education
M.A. 2003, Cognitive Science,
B.A. 2001, Cognitive Science, with honors.
Research
Experience
Graduate Researcher,
Mandarin
Imperatives
Professor: Raffaella Zanuttini
In
many languages, imperatives can be identified via forms which are particular to
imperatives. Romance languages, for example, employ particular verbal forms in
imperatives, and Korean marks imperatives with the sentence final particle e-la
(Pak,
2004). In Mandarin, there does not seem to be a form
shared by all clauses that native speakers identify as imperatives. This paper
identifies characteristics that distinguish Mandarin imperatives from Mandarin
declaratives and interrogatives.
This
work was prompted by Profs. Zanuttini and Portner’s
concern with giving a precise answer to the question: Where do clauses get their
sentential force? (e.g. What makes an imperative an imperative and not, say, a
declarative?) I encourage you to check
out their clause
typing project page.
Overlapping Violations:
Advisor: Paul Smolensky
FYI, I recently became aware of a dissertation on
tone sandhi that includes a big section on
Computational Complexity of Optimality Theory
Advisor: Robert Frank
I’ve been looking at how the family of faithfulness
constraints can be implemented in finite-state models of Optimality Theory.
Frank and Satta (1998) and Karttunen (1998) proposed models that explicitly
formalized markedness constraints and solved some considerable weaknesses of
earlier models, but lost the means to straightforwardly implement faithfulness
constraints. You could always change
your representations and recast faithfulness constraints as markedness
constraints, but I propose a model that allows us to think of constraints
as restrictions on input-output pairs.
It’s easier for me to think about things this way - Although, I can’t
tell if it’s easier for me because I thought of it myself or if it really is
more straightforward. If you’re curious,
here is the link for the handout from my LSA
2004 presentation.
My first qualifying paper was on how to let a
formal model of OT distinguish between an unbounded number of constraint
violations, like in classic OT, while keeping the system finite state. A number
of people have suggested different ways to do this, including Jason Eisner in the Computer Science department here. My attempt wasn’t very satisfying, which is why
I’m directing you to Jason’s page instead, but if you are working on this, I am
happy to dialogue with you.
Research Collaborator,
Acquisition
of Temporal Marking in Mandarin
Primary
Investigator: Géraldine
Legendre.
In work with Géraldine Legendre, Paul Hagstrom, and
Liang Tao, we analyze the acquisition
of the earliest temporal markers in Mandarin speaking children. Like other children acquiring a language,
these children produced adult-like forms alongside non-adult like forms. We use an Optimality Theoretic framework to
account for both variation and frequencies of variation in child utterances at
different stages, which complemented previous work on acquisition of French and
Catalan.
Howard Hughes Research Fellow, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
(1999)
Central
Auditory Processing and Bilingualism
I compared central
auditory processing of English and Mandarin in speakers with varying degrees of
exposure to and proficiency in English and Mandarin.
Undergraduate Research Assistant,
Neural Bases of Central Auditory Processing
Supervisor: Dana Boatman
In Dr. Boatman’s lab, I
assisted with electrophysiological and behavioral testing of auditory
processing in children with autism, attention deficit disorder, and/or auditory
processing difficulties and in children and adults without such
difficulties. This work focused on the
neural bases of normal and disordered auditory processing.
Academic
Honors
One of the nice things about
fellowships is that you can get paid to go to school. On top of that, you become a more attractive
applicant. My suspicion is that many
qualified people don’t even bother applying.
Ask and you shall receive. Click here for a list of student
fellowships and grants put together by the
National
Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (awarded 2001-2004)
This fellowship is not
that well known, but it’s a generous one.
If you are a senior or a first or second year grad, I strongly encourage
you to apply.
Phi Beta Kappa,
Howard Hughes
Summer Research Fellowship Program (1999)
This is a program for
undergrads and, again, I strongly recommend applying.
Service
Volunteer, Good
Samaritan Hospital (2003-2004)
Supervisor:
Donna Gotsch
Donna Gotsch is a
speech-language pathologist and I helped out with the therapy of a
Mandarin-English bilingual patient with aphasia.
Publications
and Presentations
Chen-Main, Joan. 2005. Exploring Multidominance in
Tree Adjoining Grammar. Invited talk presented at the Institute for Research in
Cognitive Science,
Chen-Main, Joan. 2005. Characteristics of Mandarin Imperatives.
In C. Brandstetter and D. Rus, eds.,
Chen-Main, Joan. 2005. A Unified Mechanism for
Coordination and Movement in a Tree Adjoining Grammar Framework. Poster presented at Hopkins Workshop on
Language 3,
Legendre, Géraldine, Paul Hagstrom, Joan Chen-Main,
Liang Tao, and Paul Smolensky. 2004.
Deriving Output Probabilities in Child Mandarin from a Dual-Optimization
Grammar. Lingua. 114:1147-1185
Chen-Main, Joan. 2004. How to
Know When Looking Harder Isn’t the Answer: the unavailability of a classic OT
analysis for
Chen-Main, Joan and Robert
Frank. 2004. Incorporating Faithfulness
in
Chen-Main, Joan. 2003.
Chen-Main,
Joan and Robert Frank. 2003.
Implementing Faithfulness Constraints in a
Chen-Main,
Joan. Keeping Faith in
Chen-Main, Joan, Géraldine Legendre, Paul Hagstrom,
and Liang Tao. 2002. Sentence Final le in Child Mandarin. Talk presented at
HUMDRUM 2002,
Hagstrom,
Paul, Joan Chen-Main, Géraldine Legendre, and Liang Tao. 2001. Default ne
in Child Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Cognitive Science 2: 81-118.
Legendre,
Géraldine, Paul Hagstrom, Liang Tao, Joan Chen-Main,
and Lisa Davidson. 2001. A Preliminary Look at the Acquisition of Aspect in
Mandarin Chinese in Optimality Theory. In Chen, L. and Zhou, Y, eds. Proceedings
of the Third International Conference on Cognitive Science.
Legendre,
Géraldine, Paul Hagstrom, Liang Tao, Joan Chen-Main,
and Lisa Davidson. 2001. A Preliminary Look at the Acquisition of Aspect in
Mandarin Chinese in Optimality Theory. Talk presented at the Third
International Conference on Cognitive Science,
Chen,
Joan, and Dana Boatman. 1999. Central Auditory Processing in Native,
Non-native, and Bilingual Speakers of Chinese. Poster presented at Howard
Hughes Summer Research Fellowship Poster Session.
Boatman,
D., B. Gordon, R. Webber, R. Downey, J. Chen, P. Saha, R. Yi, and G. Krauss.
1999. Contribution of Central Auditory Processing Disorders to Variability in
Mismatch Negativity. Accepted as a platform presentation in Clinical
Neurophysiology Symposium at American Speech Language Hearing Association
Conference.
Teaching
Assistantships
050.330/630 Psycholinguistics, Professor: William
Badecker (Spring 2004)
050.370/670 Formal Methods in Cognitive Science:
Language, Professor: Robert Frank (Fall 2003)
050.203 Cognitive Neuroscience, Professor: Brenda
Rapp (Spring 2003, 2005)
050.205 Structure of English, Professor: Luigi
Burzio (Fall 2002, 2004)
050.101 Cognition, Professor: Robert Frank (Spring
2002)